Watch a discussion on focusing on job-specific skills (instead of best practices culture), training in a virtual environment, and integrating racial equity across child welfare training.

Explore how child welfare professionals and organizations can build capacity for implementing the reasonable and prudent parent standard (RPPS) for children and youth in foster care. 

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

Learn about the practice and systemic changes Hawaii, Indiana, and Westchester County, NY, made in partnership with their youth and young adult partners.

Buzzwords: Moving to Behavioral Descriptors doodle video is a short, animated video that follows a child involved in a child welfare investigation. The video describes what buzzwords are and illustrates the impact they can have on children and families. It also demonstrates how to recognize buzzwords and offers strategies for transforming buzzwords into objective, behavior-based descriptors.

This publication looks at buzzwords in the context of words or phrases commonly used in child welfare reporting and documentation that can be subjective or carry negative connotations, and offers strategies to minimize their negative impact.

Learn about Catherine’s journey recovering from trauma and addiction to be successfully reunified with her daughter.

Reflect on past results to inform plans for future improvements.

Presents the sixth and final task of team building: debriefing, evaluating, and identifying the next steps to assess completion and determine how the team will sustain the intervention. As explained in this module, at this point teams also determine whether they need to continue with their work or whether another team needs to be convened.

Presents factors that may impact plans to conduct an assessment, how teams can clearly communicate the need for the readiness assessment, and what teams need to consider before conducting an assessment.

Consider whose perspectives are represented on your team. 

Presents the second task, identifying a long-term outcome, and provides examples of how to apply strategies. Identifying a long-term outcome that is specific, achievable, and understandable helps teams establish a goal that is focused, feasible, and clear.

Explores how the factors of motivation, general capacity, and intervention-specific capacity influence agency readiness for change. This video provides examples of and considerations for conducting readiness assessments.

Explores the first task of team building: identifying the team’s purpose by developing mission goals and objectives. This module helps the team write a mission statement as part of a change and implementation process at a child welfare agency.

Examines the third task, developing the pathway or pathways of change to reach the long-term outcome, and provides examples of how to apply strategies. Casual links connect the root cause(s) of the problem to the long-term outcome, and “tell the story of how success will be recognized” at each level in the pathway.