2023 Annual State Summary of Exemplary Practices
The Community-Based Child Abuse Prevention (CBCAP) Program provides federal funding to all 50 States, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and several tribal and migrant grantees. The funds are for the implementation of community-based and prevention-focused programs and activities designed to strengthen and support families to prevent child abuse and neglect. This summary highlights child abuse prevention activities and services implemented during the 2023 funding year by CBCAP State Lead Agencies.
Federal Fiscal Year 2023 saw states focus on funding and implementing effective primary and secondary community-based prevention services that are easily accessible and culturally responsive. To help accomplish this, states partnered with parents, caregivers, and community members including those from underrepresented and underserved groups, in the planning and implementation of child abuse prevention programs and services. These partnerships provided the opportunity to identify the unique strengths and needs of communities and develop approaches that are effective in reaching and supporting diverse families.
The information shared below provides a snapshot of services provided throughout the country through specific state examples related to Support for Kinship Families; Fatherhood Programs; Universal Approaches to Support Families; Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Initiatives; Needs Assessments and Prevention Planning; and Evaluation Strategies.
Click this button to view Data Profiles of each state and the nation compiled utilizing the Annual CBCAP State Reports.
Support for Kinship Families
The following descriptions provide examples of how two CBCAP state lead agencies support kinship families.
Grandparents Raising Grandchildren implements the Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Information Center of Louisiana (GRGICL) whose mission is to improve the quality of life for Louisiana’s kinship caregivers and the children in their care. GRGICL is an organization dedicated to offering both information and support to grandparents and other kinship caregivers and their families. The specific services they provide include a 24-hour hotline for assistance, monthly support group meetings around the state, technical assistance in creation of support groups in underserved areas, limited financial assistance to support groups, and periodic legal issues workshops.
GRGICL collaborated with Urban Restoration Enhancement Corporation (UREC) in 2024 on their most successful project, the Grandparents’ House, which is an affordable housing project located in north Baton Rouge that rents out apartments at reduced rates to grandparents raising grandchildren. GRGICL also participates in events such as health fairs, back to school fairs, and other events to share information and resources for kinship families.
All six Massachusetts Family Centers serve grandparents in some capacity, some of whom are the primary caretakers for their grandchildren. Valuing Our Children (A Family Center serving Athol/North Quabbin) has a long history of giving special attention to these grandparents, often facilitating ongoing support groups. Grandparents’ Group is aimed at helping grandparents strengthen their families by identifying what they need, obtaining information on resources, and providing support and advocacy for one another. This group is supported in part by the Older Americans Act, LifePath, and Executive Office of Elder Affairs and is a key component to the approach that MA Children’s Trust encourages, that family centers serve all their communities’ families with young children.
In FFY 2022 and 2023, staff reported that some grandparents who had moved out of the area were continuing to participate through Zoom, having grown close to other members of the group and unable to find anything similar in their new communities. Supplemental CBCAP funds authorized by the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) allowed Valuing Our Children to make sure that as many families as possible, including kinship families, had access to concrete resources and opportunities in the years immediately following the pandemic, providing greater stability to many children in this hardworking, under-resourced region of Massachusetts.
Fatherhood Programs and Initiatives
The following describes how six CBCAP state lead agencies’ efforts in engaging fathers to promote increased involvement and leadership through tailored programming, creative partnerships and supportive initiatives.
The Connecticut Office of Early Childhood (OEC) has identified fathers in their outreach activities. The OEC has developed an approach to father engagement that seeks to engage, excite, and educate the Connecticut home visitor network and the parents they seek to serve. For the past few years, the OEC has collaborated with community partners and OEC male home-visiting staff to provide parenting support to men within Cybulski Correctional Center and Manson Youth Institute. The goal of this work is to dually expose parents and prison staff to tangible ways of supporting children with limited physical interaction.
At the Cybulski Correctional Center, “Nest Building, Successful Co-Parenting so Children can Thrive” is a multi-sensory presentation, using research, music, photos, videos, role-plays, and lively interactive conversation. With a focus on fathers and male caregivers, parents have an opportunity to discover ways to enhance their children’s success while co-parenting whether they are in a love relationship or not and to support their development. Principles of adult learning are used to facilitate the program and different teaching modalities are employed to meet different learning styles. The program is designed to include moms who are invited to attend specific sessions. In-person visits were held in a renovated family-friendly visitation room that the OEC team supported. OEC provided books for the children to take home after the visits. The incarcerated parents kept copies of the gifted books to continue the connection through reading together during nightly virtual visits. When outside staff and volunteers were not allowed inside the facility, the program utilized interactive digital whiteboards previously purchased by the OEC, and pre-recorded workshops were delivered.
The Manhood Tree group session explored the six “hoods”: Neighborhood, Boyhood, Young Adulthood, Brotherhood, Fatherhood, and Manhood. The goal of each session is for the participants to engage fully, allow themselves to work through the session, and be able to express their thoughts and feelings openly. Men who completed fatherhood training with OEC staff were invited to design and co-host a dance for their children. Caring adults, including moms, grandparents, aunties or uncles, coordinated with Department of Corrections staff to bring their children to the dance. A carnival-themed father/child dance was held in September 2023.
Connecticut continues to look to the fathers they support to innovate programming. In the future, they will host an event that centers the resilience of formally incarcerated men, creating space for men to share their journey from within the facility to fatherhood in the community.
The District of Columbia’s Child and Family Service Agency uses CBCAP funding for the Mary’s Center Father Child Attachment Program that provides services to fathers of young children (from infancy to five years old) deemed high risk and eligible for home visitation services. Generally, the program includes three components: home visitation, wraparound services, and routine fatherhood outings. These activities are designed to increase parent-child bonding, understanding of child development milestones, and supporting the father’s own self-awareness.
Mary’s Center has been able to develop a hybrid method of program implementation by meeting participants virtually and in-person as safety permits. The program utilizes the Parents as Teachers (PAT) curriculum and the 24/7 Dad program, incorporating lessons that promote positive parent-child interactions. Family Support Workers conduct home visits and discuss interactions between the father and their child. The anecdotal feedback is then used as a learning tool to promote increased awareness and understanding of the impact of parental behavior on child responses. In addition, Mary’s Center provides support to participants in areas including educational, legal, concrete, and general life skills support. The Family Support Workers provide families with resources that include acquiring medical insurance, educational opportunities and navigating the custody legal system. The program has shown improvement in the attachment between the fathers and children participating in the program, as well as an increase in protective factors, including positive improvement in the relationships and interactions between the father (usually the non-custodial parent) and the child’s mother.
Using CBCAP supplemental funds, the Prevention and Community Support (PCS) Section of the Georgia Department of Human Services, Division of Family and Children funded several providers who serve minority, marginalized communities such as the 100 Black Men of Atlanta Fatherhood Initiative. The 100 Black Men of Atlanta’s Fatherhood Initiative promotes responsible fatherhood, healthy marriage, and/or economic stability through a combination of workshops, educational based programs, partnerships through networking, and case management. The program assists fathers with socioeconomic challenges and additional barriers that impede stability and child well-being, and those formally incarcerated in the Atlanta area.
Using CBCAP supplemental funds, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services continues to support the Advancing Fathers Pilot Program through partnership with the Child Welfare Community Agency, Brightpoint. Services are aimed at facilitating the development and expansion of regional fatherhood coalition building, while also promoting community education and networking to establish new parent groups that foster father’s parental involvement. The three-year pilot project continues to expand and deliver mutual, self-help parent support groups for custodial and non-custodial fathers as a foundational community entry point of service for fathers in the Northern and Central areas of Illinois.
To promote the program, the following strategies were developed:
- On-the-ground community outreach through community presentations and one-on-one conversations with community leaders.
- Community Table Talk—regular lunch meetings with the representatives from the Hispanic community.
- Three Dad Talks were delivered through Zoom in FY24. All have been uploaded and continue to be utilized on YouTube.
- Extensive email coverage through creating distribution lists covering every Illinois system and county.
- Over the last year, 52 fathers utilized the resource “hub”, where they were able to connect with needed services in their local communities and over 84,000 contacts were made through email outreach.
- Using educational presentations as opportunities to survey attendees and offer them the chance to receive fatherhood program information within their region or services provided virtually.
- Examples include Community Educational Event for Fatherhood: “Families, Fathers & Substance Abuse: What Can We Do?” & “Creating Your Own Fatherhood Blueprint”.
- Establishing father-focus groups and informational sessions to refer fathers to community-based fatherhood services.
- An additional father support group was formed in 2024, in partnership with the Thriving Fathers & Families program.
The program is now in year three and is experiencing tremendous growth and expansion, as they have established a firm foundation and long-term planning is underway for this successful venture. The program’s future goals are to incorporate services and resources for fathers and mental health during the perinatal period. There is interest in a partnership with the three fatherhood coalitions to bring a new pilot called Fathers and Babies to Illinois and for continuing research through the coalition work.
The Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) has continued to partner with the Parent Support Network (PSN) on the Rhode Island Fatherhood Initiative (RIFI). The RIFI has an interagency state leadership team with strong father leadership committed to developing and sustaining activities that promote father inclusion in state policies and practices for Rhode Island children and families. This state team has been working with the National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) Community Mobilization Action (CMA) approach for their strategic planning process that included a Leadership Summit on fatherhood engagement. The goals of the summit were the following:
- To increase interagency collaboration in fatherhood Initiatives such as a fatherhood awareness campaign
- To increase fathers’ involvement in services for their families
- Advocate for legislative changes
- Maintain a teen father group to better engage young fathers in services and increase their involvement with their children
Members of RIFI, including the PSN Fatherhood Coordinator, also co-facilitate fatherhood engagement training for all new staff at DCYF and have networked with local libraries to hold “Reading with Dad’s Hour,” and participate in the annual New England Fathering Conference.
The Strengthening Families Washington (SFWA) team in the Prevention, Partnerships, and Services Division of the Washington Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) partnered with the DCYF Office of Tribal Relations (OTR) to plan for and implement a Tribal Fatherhood Support Initiative using supplemental CBCAP funds authorized by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. SFWA and OTR also explored options for expanding capacity for culturally responsive, prevention-focused parent support for American Indian and Alaska Native fathers and father figures with the hope of supporting programming led by Tribal Nations or Recognized American Indian Organizations.
The state identified a competitive request for applications (RFA) as the most open and fair process for selecting programs to fund. Partnering together resulted in an RFA process that was tailored to Tribal Nations and Native Serving Organizations and helped SFWA build stronger relationships with Tribal partners. In the process, SFWA consulted with staff/leaders from the Washington Fatherhood Council led by the Department of Social and Health Services for guidance, feedback, and outreach. The outcome of these efforts was contracts with two tribes and a native serving organization to provide programs for fathers and father figures for the purposes of increasing family strengths, enhancing child development, and reducing the likelihood of child abuse and neglect.
Universal Approaches to Support Families
Hope Florida is an initiative unifying communities by utilizing Hope Navigators to guide Floridians on an individualized path to prosperity, economic self-sufficiency, and hope. Families can join the Hope Florida program by calling the Hope Line. Hope Line agents provide Floridians with immediate referrals to resources and services and connect them with a Hope Navigator, as appropriate. Hope Navigators are the “secret sauce” of the Hope Florida model and help individuals identify their unique and immediate barriers, develop long-term goals, and provide warm hand-offs to local community partners who can help in achieving their goals.
In June 2023, the Department of Children and Families established a process for parents calling the Florida Abuse Hotline for assistance with community services (such as food, baby items, counseling, housing, etc.), to be provided a warm transfer to the HOPE Line for assistance. Over 1,600 families have been transferred to the Hope Line from the Florida Abuse Hotline. This is in addition to the over 19,000 families referred to Hope Florida from Child Protective Investigators. Through these referrals Hope Navigators have been able to assist over 20,000 families with resources and services to address their needs and prevent the need for child welfare intervention in these families’ lives.
Through a statewide network of formally established Community Well-Being (CWB) Collaboratives, Nebraska Children and Families Foundation built community capacity with an approach known as Community Response emerging as a strategic alignment of partners and resources coordinating with one another to support local children, youth, and families and prevent involvement in higher-end systems like child welfare, juvenile and adult justice, and homelessness. The robust Community Response prevention system is organized into : Central Navigation, Coaching, Leadership and Engagement, Support Services Funds and the Youth and Families Thrive Framework.
Youth and Families Thrive is a comprehensive brain-based, multi generation framework that integrates CSSP’s Strengthening Families™ and Youth Thrive™ frameworks focused on strengthening children, youth, family and community promotive and protective factors so all children, youth and families can thrive. This framework reinforces the core principles of the Community Wellbeing Model specifically:
- Youth and Family Leadership, Partnership and Engagement
- Multi Generation Approach
- Race, Equity and Inclusion
- Promotive and Protective Factors
Central Navigation is the component of Community Response through which parents, community members, and young adults are matched to services in a coordinated streamlined approach and provides access to Support Services Funds, which are flexible and supportive funding. Services may be formal or informal, are voluntary, and matched to individual goals and needs. CNs address service needs, gaps, and barriers and identify strategies to address these issues through collaborative partnerships with community partners, lived experience community members, and state partners. Common evidence-informed strategies for parents connecting to local prevention systems include Circle of Security Parenting (COSP), Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), and Parents Interacting with Infants (PIWI). A subset of the people who engage with the Central Navigation component of Community Response may also participate in coaching.
Youth and families in Nebraska have access to voluntary, participant-led Coaching services that provide a goal-oriented, strength-based approach to develop skills, get connected to supportive services, build socio-emotional competence, build relationships, and enhance protective and promotive factors. For those Community Response participants utilizing coaching, they reported statistically significant improvements in Promotive and Protective Factors including Social Connections, Concrete Supports, Hope, and Resilience.
Leadership and Engagement occurs when lived experience experts are welcomed, heard, and have the opportunities and shared power to co-create and co-design community and system solutions at all decision- making levels. As the backbone support element of a community-based prevention system, Community Response is designed to be the coordination and intersection point where children, young adults, families, and service providers work together by establishing intentional and meaningful leadership opportunities for participation in planning, implementing, and evaluating system efforts that support personal growth to gain the knowledge and skills to function in leadership roles and represent youth and parent voices to help shape the direction of their families, programs, and communities.
The New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) launched the state’s new mandated reporter training in February 2023. The new training’s overarching theme is, “You can support a family without having to report a family.” The training’s updates focus on reducing or eliminating implicit bias to prevent calls to the Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment (SCR) based on racial or economic/poverty biases among mandated reports. The training additionally provides mandated reporters with information about adverse childhood events (ACEs) and guidance on better detection of child abuse or maltreatment in virtual settings. Referrals to vital necessities like food, health care, and housing can make all the difference when a family simply needs to be supported to prevent child maltreatment.
The OCFS HEARS Line is the resource that connects families with the services and supports they need to prevent child welfare involvement and improve well-being. HEARS (Help, Empower, Advocate, Reassure, and Support) representatives assist families by providing referrals in a variety of areas such as food, clothing, housing, medical and behavioral health care services, parenting education, childcare services, and more.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Initiatives
In partnership with the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the Arizona Department of Child Services (DCS) facilitates Refugee Cultural Orientation classes twice a month to discuss preventive strategies with refugee families as part of the IRC’s program to ensure refugees thrive in America. During these classes, families are presented with safe sleep practices, alternative discipline methods, domestic violence resources while introducing positive parenting practices and the Protective Factors Framework. DCS has provided information to immigrant and refugee families about parent behaviors that are deemed abusive or neglectful in Arizona that may lead to DCS involvement while respecting their culture and any past traumas that may impact their parenting in new surroundings. These classes are held within the first three weeks of families arriving in the United States.
DCS also assists with concrete needs by enrolling refugee families in the Car Seat and Pack ‘n Play programs to provide these needed items to families in need. Additionally, DCS has developed a “Strong Family Toolkit.” This Toolkit, created in English, Spanish, Arabic, Farsi and Swahili, is a hand-held document that describes the Protective Factors and provides community resources for each. The Toolkit also has space for providers to enter their contact information so all the family’s providers can be found on one document. Over 12,000 copies of the Strong Family Toolkit have been distributed throughout Arizona.
California has several efforts in place to support and provide culturally relevant prevention services to Tribes in their state. In 2023, the Office of Child Abuse Prevention (OCAP) initiated a process to ensure that Title IV-E Agreement Tribes receive CBCAP funds, facilitating access to primary and secondary prevention services for tribal children and families in California. The OCAP began drafting Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) to grant Title IV-E Agreement Tribes access to CBCAP funding. These MOUs specify the target populations, intended services, responsibilities of the involved parties, fiscal provisions, dispute resolution methods, and terms for modification and termination. The OCAP’s mission is to make the CBCAP allocation process equitable for Tribes, as data shows that Tribal children are disproportionately represented in the child welfare system. For FY 2024-25, the OCAP will continue collaborating with the Office of Tribal Affairs (OTA) and the Title IV-E Agreement Tribes to fully implement the CBCAP MOUs.
In October 2023, OCAP initiated a pilot program grant for all federally recognized Tribes in California, building upon the existing “Road to Resilience” grant. This new initiative, the Tribal Road to Resilience program, will issue a Request for Application (RFA) for fiscal years (FY) 2025-28. The RFA will offer competitive grant funding to Tribes, Tribal organizations, and Tribal Consortia, collectively referred to as “Grantee(s).” The program aims to support interagency collaboration and service integration to address the needs of pregnant Tribal members with known histories of substance use, pregnant Tribal members with current substance use, and parents or caregivers of substance-exposed infants (collectively termed the “priority population” as defined by each Tribe). Selected grantees will be tasked with providing the priority population, including their infants and families, with navigation services that connect them to community-based agencies and resources for parenting support and concrete assistance. The goal is to mitigate risks associated with substance exposure and maltreatment of infants. To achieve this, grantees will develop or enhance collaborative partnerships among Tribal health organizations, Tribal consortia, and community-based organizations. These partnerships will focus on identifying the target population, reducing substance use, preventing relapse, and improving outcomes for children affected by parental substance use.
The California Department of Social Services (CDSS) collaborated with the California Training Institute and the Cahto Tribe on the webinar “Fostering Tribal-County Collaboration: The Cahto-Mendocino Experience.” During the webinar, the state provided guidance on the importance of Tribal engagement across California and explained the Comprehensive Prevention Plan (CPP) guidelines regarding Tribal involvement. The webinar aimed to inform counties on how to effectively build and strengthen relationships with Tribes in their communities to raise awareness about prevention services.
Another strategy to address diversity, equity and inclusion within systems is the Center for Family Strengthening using a portion of CBCAP funding to seed the Promotores Collaborative as a parent/caregiver engagement, leadership development project designed to involve the Latinx parents with their schools and civic tables. What started off as a small grass-roots project requiring a part-time project coordinator has evolved over eleven years into a highly valued program requiring the guidance of a full-time Director and a full-time Administrator managing numerous contracts and supervising three Project Coordinators and a team of six part-time bilingual, bicultural Promotores. The Promotores Collaborative built upon what they have learned to expand targeted population health outreach projects with agency partners and served as designers of an innovative mental health interpretation service model.
As part of the Idaho prevention service array, the Idaho Children’s Trust Fund supports primary prevention programs such as the Imagination Initiative. The Imagination Initiative promotes equality in the lives of low-income families and students by making technology affordable for all. ICTF funded their project to refurbish laptops, chrome books, and other gently used digital devices so low-income families, students, and other non-profits have the technology they need to connect with on-line schooling, services, community, jobs, family, doctors, counselors, parenting classes, etc. This primary prevention program is helping families thrive through access to technology.
Needs Assessments and Prevention Planning
Using CBCAP funds, Colorado supported local communities in planning coordinated prevention efforts across the state. As part of the planning initiative, Colorado’s Department of Early Childhood (CDEC) worked with The Butler Institute at the University of Denver to provide technical assistance to community grantees on:
- The construction and collection of a Parent and Community Asset Survey and focus group data
- The construction of a tailored online survey for each grantee
- The data collection monitoring, analysis of survey results, and production of a summary report
An aggregated report for CDEC on all parent survey responses across sites is made available to selected regions or populations as requested.
CDEC has an ongoing relationship with the Butler Institute and next steps include a longitudinal analysis of parent survey data, assisting with the construction of an online dashboard, and developing tools to continue assisting communities in ensuring prevention planning is family informed.
Maine Children’s Trust (the Trust) continued to provide support to strengthen the Prevention Councils in all 16 counties. The Trust provided county-specific data, presentations for local use, materials, and step-by-step guidance on plan development for all Prevention Councils. Data sources included the State’s child abuse and neglect data system, Kids Count data, Maine Integrated Youth Health Survey County Reports, National Child Health Survey, Maine CDC, Data, Research, and Vital Statistics, Census data, and data gathered in the Trust’s data system.
The Prevention Council Toolkit (updated annually) provides detailed support and steps to the Prevention Councils in utilizing the county-level child maltreatment data, looking at root causes, the community’s existing protective factors or gaps, and community involvement. In addition to providing detailed child abuse and neglect data for their county, the Trust also provided graphs, analysis tools, and discussion guides for engagement of cross-systems partners in the development of the county-level prevention plans.
To support continuous quality improvement, the Trust provides training directly to Prevention Council staff and community partners in the Standards of Quality for Family Strengthening and Support to ensure parent voice is incorporated, assess quality practice, ensure a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as addressing community conditions that impact families’ healthy development.
Trained in the collective impact model and as part of the Maine’s Child Safety and Family Well-Being Plan, the Prevention Councils are convening community partners, parents, caregivers, and youth in every county to identify existing Community Based-Spaces for families with at least one protective factor and assess opportunities to enhance or expand these spaces locally. Overall, the Trust supports the Prevention Councils to use a structured approach to build a system of support for local communities and families by ensuring the following:
- A focus on primary and secondary child abuse prevention strategies
- Utilizing the social-ecological model and the Protective Factors framework
- Delivering approved research-informed curriculums and supports with fidelity
- Conducting an annual Needs Assessment
- Creating an annual Prevention Plan that provides an inventory to address unmet needs informed by the Office of Child and Family Services (OCFS) child maltreatment data as well as many other family and child focused data sources
- Offering activities in response to unique county-specific needs
- Working with an Advisory Board comprised of over 300 diverse members (including parent leaders, community leaders, and local OCFS staff)
- Evaluating parenting education and professional training to ensure families’ voices are heard
- Ensuring the promotion of parent and family leadership opportunities
The Minnesota Promotion and Prevention Unit of the Department of Human Services collaborated with the MN Story Collective to develop and pilot an innovative community engagement tool and process that allows families to share their stories. Adapted from Kansas Our Tomorrows, this tool helps to capture, organize and categorize families’ perspectives to make community input accessible on a large-scale, and inform a variety of needs assessment strategies across state agencies. Families share their stories through an online open-ended story collection prompt and answer other questions to self-code their data. As stories and other responses are collected, MN StoryCollective brings community members, community partner organizations, and staff from the state, counties, and cities together to discuss what stories and other data mean to them in events called “Sensemaking Sessions.” The discussion ends with brainstorming next steps based on the data, stories, and discussion.
MN StoryCollective collects stories in this way for multiple reasons. Using an open-ended prompt means the State hears what matters most to storytellers. ‘Self-coding’ also helps state staff and decisionmakers try to understand what’s been shared through the storyteller’s own lens. The initiative’s goal is to coordinate community engagement and create responsive programs, policies and practices across all issues that impact children and families. The state contracted with fourteen community partners to collect families’ stories and host sensemaking sessions across the state.
In its first year of implementation, MN StoryCollective gathered over 1,000 responses in partnership with fourteen community partners and hosted six Sensemaking Sessions. About 40 people attended each session. Attendees from a wide range of ages, races/ethnicities, and languages-spoken participated in each session, including state of Minnesota leaders and colleagues, community partners, and the individuals they serve. Participants shared positive feedback and indicated they are eager for other opportunities to participate in MN StoryCollective sessions. Following these sessions, MN StoryCollective shares recommended next steps with state staff and others.
Through these story collections and sensemaking efforts, individuals have shared a variety of experiences and needs. Importantly, many participants shared a strong desire to support their families’ well-being and to keep their families together. Many participants identified financial stressors and challenges with qualifying for benefit programs. They want greater flexibility in program financial eligibility requirements, as well as preventative resources in their community to support well-being including mental health. The Promotion and Prevention Unit will continue to utilize learnings from these diverse sources and focus on efforts to address ongoing system inefficiencies, build collaborations across systems, connect families to services and supports that will promote well-being, address racial inequities, and prevent child protection system involvement.
To learn more, please read the MN StoryCollective annual report: https://mn.gov/mmb/assets/annual-report-2023_tcm1059-628129.pdf
Evaluation
The following includes evaluation methods, strategies and partnerships utilized to assess, enhance and/or strengthen prevention services in four states.
The Children’s Trust Fund of Missouri (CTF) launched a statewide home visiting referral system and outcomes rate card in FY 2023, which are part of a broader initiative to improve the home visiting system in Missouri. Desired system improvements include increased prenatal enrollment, increased collaboration among funders and local providers, increased funding for evidence-based programs, and aligned data collection to understand performance and impact across models.
The statewide referral system is a web-based platform designed to scale access to home visiting for all Missouri families and increase prenatal enrollment by systematically referring pregnant women and foster care teens enrolled in Medicaid through a referral partnership with managed care organizations. It also affords referral uptake data that helps the state to identify where additional home visiting services may be needed, which CTF hopes will eventually inform the state’s resource allocation and advocacy for additional funding. The system is comprised of five regional referral networks that are managed by state-funded home visiting collective impact sites and include a variety of high-quality home visiting models.
The outcomes rate card (ORC) is a 4-year pilot project that CTF developed in collaboration with Social Finance, a national nonprofit specializing in impact finance. It provides incentive payments to home visiting providers based on achievement of key program performance metrics that CTF believes will drive improved family outcomes, such as prenatal enrollment, adequate program dosage, long-term retention, etc. To emphasize prenatal enrollment as a top priority for the initiative, CTF allocated the majority of incentive funds to prenatal enrollment payments and tiered pricing to further incentivize enrollment of BIPOC and teen parents. In addition to driving statewide program performance improvements, the ORC also enables CTF to collect aligned data across program models that will be used to evaluate home visiting outcomes statewide and perform a Missouri cost-benefit analysis. CTF has partnered with the University of Missouri to perform this evaluation.
The New Jersey Department of Children and Families (DCF) in partnership with the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers continued efforts to utilize geospatial risk analysis, strategic alignment of community initiatives, and implementation of accountable prevention programs to create the components of an effective primary prevention bundle. The Camden Coalition is a multidisciplinary community-based non-profit working to improve care for people with complex health and social needs in the city of Camden, across New Jersey, and around the country. This partnership with the Camden Coalition is funded by CBCAP and designed to support the state’s Predict, Align, Prevent efforts.
In FFY23, DCF and Camden Coalition completed geospatial risk analyses and service gap analyses for select municipalities, began to review the findings with internal stakeholders, and planned for additional external stakeholder engagement. DCF engaged internal stakeholders around the results of the analyses and began to plan for external stakeholder engagement, e.g., police, health, and human services. Additionally, DCF intends to expand analyses to include three additional municipalities – Trenton, Newark, and Salem City.
With assistance and in collaboration with the Office of Children Youth and Families (OCYF) and Office of Child Development and Early Learning (OCDEL), the Pennsylvania Family Support Alliance (PFSA) contributes to the state’s child abuse prevention efforts through a continuum of community-based family support and strengthening services. This includes the delivery of the research-supported, trauma-informed, and culturally sensitive parenting curriculum, Families in Recovery: Strengthening Connections One Day at A Time, for caregivers living in recovery from substance use disorder. The program continues to receive statewide attention because of truly meeting parents and caregivers where they are through a program based on resilience and peer support. A formal evaluation allows the PFSA to collect quality programmatic data across sites and create access to the program for new sites due to the removal of program fees during the evaluation period, which can be a barrier for some agencies. The evaluation is led by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s (CHOP) Policy Lab team.
The Families in Recovery parent education and support curriculum has concluded the formal implementation evaluation (Phase 1) and is conducting an evaluation of key facilitators and barriers to implementation in Phase 2, in partnership with the CHOP Policy Lab. In Phase 1, the CHOP Policy Lab team used mixed methods to evaluate Families in Recovery, including engaging key stakeholders such as program facilitators, administrators, and participants through in-depth qualitative interviews, longitudinal surveys, a focus group and site observations. The implementation evaluation identified best practices and areas of congruence with other family-centered recovery programs and the concept of fidelity to group models. PFSA has used the evaluation to further understand core concepts of fidelity and program participation, as perceived by key stakeholders, and assess fidelity of the program model across sites. The formal implementation evaluation of the Families in Recovery program has produced updated curriculum materials, additional resources, and a revised training and onboarding program for all new program facilitators.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, families experienced high levels of stress and fatigue due to economic uncertainty, isolation, illness, and limited access to supports and services, causing a significant impact on health and mental health needs overall. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS), Division of Prevention and Early Intervention (PEI) responded by increasing the ability of grantees to provide basic needs supports in the form of gift cards and in-kind goods, such as diapers and food. Though PEI programs already provided some basic needs supports to families, supplemental American Rescue Plan and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funding increased the amount of basic need support that could be provided to around $500 per enrolled family per year for some programs.
This financial support helped families attend to basic and emergency needs, allowing them to better turn their attention toward parenting roles. “The Value of Basic Need Support to Prevention and Early Intervention Program Families”, a study conducted for DFPS by the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center in 2023, found that families participating in home visiting programs, and other programming funded by PEI, between 2019 and 2023 agreed that basic needs support reduced stress levels, with monetary support like gift cards (versus in kind support) having the most impact. Key findings of the study included:
- PEI programs successfully targeted the families who were most vulnerable during the pandemic to receive supports. Grantees were more likely to distribute basic needs to caregivers pregnant at enrollment, unmarried parents and couples, caregivers with less than a high school education, and households with low incomes, among other characteristics.
- Receipt of basic needs varied across models. The report noted that 89% of 24/7 Dads participants received basic needs supports. Other shorter duration programs provided little basic needs supports to families.
- Basic needs support was associated with positive program engagement. Families that received basic needs supports stayed in their program between 1 and 6 months longer than families not receiving supports. Families surveyed for the study reported that basic needs support impacted both their decision to join the program and continue to participate.
- Families receiving basic needs supports had higher rates of program completion. For families receiving home visiting, 54% completed their program, compared to 29% of families not receiving basic supports.
- For all types of programming, more families receiving basic needs supports met program objectives.
Overall, the study recommended that PEI continue to provide basic needs support, and information and referrals to connect families to other sources of support in communities, as an important tool to promote positive outcomes for children and families.