Combine lived expertise with agency perspectives to better understand state child welfare data.

Consider whose perspectives are represented on your team. 

Identify data sources to explore your state’s system of foster and adoptive parent licensing, recruitment, and retention.

Set the groundwork for meaningful engagement of people with lived experience in the CFSR.

Learn how to engage young people and families with lived expertise in the CFSR process at a child welfare agency. 

Reflect on past results to inform plans for future improvements.

Use this brief to explore actionable strategies for meaningful partner engagement in child welfare agency strategic planning, monitoring, and review processes.

Watch the Change and Implementation in Practice: Overview video to learn how key steps, tasks, and concepts fit together to support your agency’s change initiatives. 

Listen to an attorney and a parent ally, both partners with Washington State’s child welfare system, explain how parent partner programs are essential to prevention services.

Listen to Indiana’s child welfare partners talk about making the shift to an upstream approach to prevention services possible in this short podcast. 

Hear practical advice about transforming partnerships from the team implementing a holistic prevention program in North Carolina in this short podcast.

Learn about the Indiana Department of Child Services’ upstream prevention approach to training and development, expanding the service array, and collaborating with system partners and providers in this recorded webinar.

Learn how the Children’s Home Society of Washington’s Parents for Parents program aligns with Family First Prevention Plan goals in this recorded webinar.

Engage staff and partners with activities in this guide to start a dialogue and create a vision for a more prevention-focused child welfare system.

This recorded webinar includes examples from the field about how agencies have coordinated program monitoring, fidelity assessment, formative evaluation, and summative evaluation activities and used strategies for developing and implementing an evaluation plan.