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Plan of Safe Care: Making Safety Policy a Strategy for Child and Family Well-being Webinar Resources

Part of the Resource Collection: Child Welfare and Early Childhood: Cross-Systems Collaboration to Improve Outcomes for Young Children and Their Families Archived Webinar
April 9, 2025
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These resources are from the final webinar of the series “Moving Away from Family Separation: Cross-Systems strategies to Support Young Children and Families at Risk of Child Welfare Involvement."

Most new parents leave the hospital and enter the sometimes-scary world of being responsible for the safety and well-being of an infant. For parents who struggle with substance use and addiction, underlying stressors can make an already challenging time more difficult. A Plan of Safe Care is a family-centered plan designed to promote the safety and well-being of birthing parents and their infants with prenatal substance exposure.

Plans of Safe Care support families impacted by perinatal substance use or substance use disorders by:

  • Ensuring the parent(s) and infant remain safe and healthy
  • Working with the family to meet identified health and substance use needs
  • Connecting the family to resources in the community
  • Improving care coordination across systems

In this final webinar of the series “Moving Away from Family Separation: Cross-Systems strategies to Support Young Children and Families at Risk of Child Welfare Involvement,” learn about how two states designed preventive strategies for their Plans of Safe Care through public-private partnerships and the input of parent voices, Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families and their partners at WithinReach; and Colorado Department of Human Services—Division of Child Welfare, and their partner Illuminate Colorado.

Panelists

  • Kate Agyei Yeboah, Manager of Perinatal Partnerships, WithinReach
  • Alysia Chang, CAPTA and Federal Funding Administrator, Colorado Division of Child Welfare
  • Erinn Havig, State Innovation Specialist, Infant Toddler Court Program
  • Kelli Sutton, Director of Behavioral Health Initiatives, Illuminate CO
  • Maria Zdzieblowski, LICSW, Director of Service Continuum

Slide deck

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Early Childhood Systems Building: Whole Child, Whole Family, Whole System

Video April 3, 2025

Early childhood professionals recognize that the child- and family-serving systems that are not generally considered to be under the umbrella of the early childhood system—like housing, economic development, and transportation—are less often viewed as opportunities for or barriers to child and family well-being. Each of these systems, and how they interact with one another, impacts a child’s outcome. It is up to early childhood systems builders to identify the barriers to positive outcomes that result from an issue with any of the elements within the overall system. This is one of the early childhood systems builders’ greatest challenges, as these barriers are deeply interwoven with our country’s history and ongoing practice of discrimination and disinvestment. This video describes how BUILD views an Early Childhood System that focuses on the whole child, the whole family, and whole systems.