Round 3 of the Child and Family Services Reviews (CFSRs), conducted between 2015 and 2018, identified urgent areas of need across jurisdictions. Responding to these needs is a top priority for the Children’s Bureau. The resources below can help support agencies as they respond to these urgent areas of need, including accurate assessments, timely permanency, and family engagement.

Learning Experiences

(Available on CapLEARN; registration required)

• 2017 Child Welfare Virtual Expo: Strengthening Assessment and Decision-Making for Improved Outcomes explores strategies for improving the quality of assessments and decision- making to enhance outcomes for children, youth, and families.
• Empowering Caregivers, Strengthening Families offers videos and discussion guides that agencies can use to create a more supportive environment for resource parents, recruit new resource parents, and enlist community and partner support.
• Quality Matters: Improving Caseworker Contacts With Children, Youth, and Families offers videos, discussion guides, and assessment tools that agencies can use to discover strategies for engaging families and including family voice in case planning, identifying elements of quality contacts, practicing self-assessment and action planning, and promoting effective supervisory conversations.

Videos and Recorded Webinars With Discussion Guides

• Buzzwords: Moving Beyond Behavioral Descriptors video, discussion guide and tip sheet describes what buzzwords are and illustrates the impact they can have on children and families. Materials also demonstrate how to recognize buzzwords frequently used in child welfare reporting and documentation, and offers strategies for transforming subjective language into objective, behavior-based descriptors
• It’s All Relative: Supporting Kinship Care Discussion Guides and Video Series illustrates the complex dynamics of family relationships and caregiver support needs through real-life stories of kinship caregivers and shows how strengthening these diverse families can help achieve positive outcomes for children.

Publications

• Prepermanency Services and Support to Adoptive and Legal Guardianship Families defines services for prospective adoptive and guardianship families and raises awareness about the need for more prepermanency services.
• Quality Matters: Improving Caseworker Contacts With Children, Youth, and Families series supports child welfare agencies and contracted service providers in building capacity to conduct quality contacts between caseworkers and children, youth, parents, and resource parents.
• Pathways to Permanency: Collaborating on the APPLA Provisions of P.L. 113–183 infographic describes how agencies and courts can work together to effectively use another planned permanent living arrangement (APPLA) within federal statutory mandates and guidelines.
• Showcase: Safety Outcomes and Decision-Making Approaches brief provides jurisdictions with information on and examples of models and approaches for targeting safety outcomes for children and youth.
• Decision-Making in Child Welfare for Improved Safety Outcomes brief reviews current research around decision science and safety decision-making practices in child welfare to raise awareness regarding decision-making challenges and strategies for improved safety outcomes.
• Protective Capacities and Protective Factors: Common Ground for Protecting Children and Strengthening Families infographic  describes the protective capacities framework and the protective factors framework, both of which are used by child welfare practitioners to assess, intervene, and serve children and families.
• Pathways to Permanency: Expanding on APPLA Provisions and Youth Engagement to Improve Permanency tip sheet provides tips and strategies for implementing the APPLA provisions to improve permanency outcomes for youth.
• Parent Partner Program Navigator: Designing and Implementing Parent Partner Programs in Child Welfare toolkit presents tools and resources for agencies to use when working with families to improve existing parent partner programs or design and implement new ones.

Peer Groups

The following peer groups can help connect child welfare professionals working on responding to urgent areas of need identified by Round 3 of the CFSR. Visit the Center’s Current Peer Groups page for more information or to sign up for a peer group.

Virtual Events

Visit the Center’s Events page to learn about upcoming events focused on building community-based collaborative programs.

The Center also offers tailored services to states and jurisdictions to help build agency capacity for responding to urgent areas of need identified by the CFSR. For more information, contact your State Liaison.