This guide is designed to support administrative leaders in states and other jurisdictions in using data to assess and identify ways to improve their service array.

Learn about the range of practices comprising the continuum of youth engagement to youth empowerment.

Explore additional resources for engaging individuals with lived experience as advisors for groups, committees, boards, and more.

Explore additional resources to learn how to accurately and safely collecting data on LGBTQIA2S+ youth and young adults.

Browse the themes and key takeaways from the How We Partner With the Community to Improve Service Options podcast series.

Explore additional resources and learn strategies for moving forward with prioritizing lived expertise in child welfare.

See how coordination can improve identification, reporting, and services for youth who are victims or at risk of becoming victims of sex trafficking.

Shares Stephen’s story about being a community-based provider and policymaker in Florida, the need for laws that empower caregiver decision-making, creating Florida’s reasonable and prudent parent standard (RPPS), and the effect RPPS and normalcy laws can have on foster care.

Listen to child welfare agency leaders in the District of Columbia, service providers, partners in community collaboratives, and sister agencies talk about how they coordinate service planning and delivery, are culturally responsive to the community, and provide seamless services to families.

Listen to child welfare agency leaders in the District of Columbia talk about how they work with partners to use their different data lenses to understand the needs of families and to structure a set of services to best meet the full spectrum of needs. In Kentucky, child welfare agency leaders describe the process of finding the story behind the numbers to transform their system.

Learn about the value of kinship placements when children and youth must live outside their birth parents’ homes. 

Explore additional resources aimed at the needs of expecting and parenting teens in child welfare.

Explore additional resources to learn about the challenges of engaging difficult-to-reach populations of youth and young adults.

Explore the efforts agencies, community collaborative organizations, and others are making to bring families, youth, and communities to the table as they strive to improve the child welfare system in this podcast. 

Explore additional resources to learn actionable ways to engage in authentic, nonexploitative storytelling practices with people with lived experience and expertise.