Resources on Organizational Knowledge and Skills
The Capacity Building Center for States (the Center) has identified the following resources as particularly helpful to child welfare agency decision-makers in understanding and building organizational knowledge and skills.
Guide for Child Welfare Administrators on Evidence-Based Practice
National Association of Public Child Welfare Administrators (2012)
Provides a brief overview and history of evidence-based practice in child welfare. This guide offers insightful discussion of the challenges and opportunities in the movement toward evidence-based practice in child welfare.
Selecting and Implementing Evidence-Based Practices: A Guide for Child and Family Serving Systems
California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse (CEBC) for Child Welfare (2013)
Offers guidance on how to select and implement an evidence-based practice. This guide also includes a glossary of terms useful for becoming an educated consumer of evidence-based practices. The guide supplements the CEBC registry of evidence-based practices for children and families involved with child welfare.
Child Welfare Capacity Building Collaborative Online Learning Center: CapLEARN
Child Welfare Capacity Building Collaborative (ongoing updates)
Provides access to online trainings and learning tools that build knowledge and skills around pressing child welfare topics. The continually expanding course catalog addresses such topics as responding to child and youth sex trafficking, achieving placement stability, continuous quality improvement, the Indian Child Welfare Act, and more. (Registration required)
Child Welfare Information Gateway Website
Child Welfare Information Gateway (ongoing updates)
Serves as a clearinghouse of information and resources on topics covering the full continuum of child welfare practice from prevention of child abuse and neglect through adoption.
A Framework to Design, Test, Spread, and Sustain Effective Practice in Child Welfare
Children's Bureau (2014)
Supports child welfare professionals and funders who implement and evaluate child welfare interventions—whether developing a new intervention, implementing an existing evidence-supported intervention, or continuing to perform a longstanding practice that has yet to be formally tested.
Cost Analysis in Program Evaluation: A Guide for Child Welfare Researchers and Service Providers
Children's Bureau and JBS International, Inc. (2013)
Offers a framework for integrating cost analysis into program evaluations, which produces a fuller understanding of the programs and services studied. This guide presents key cost analysis principles and concepts, explains core steps, and describes the advantages of specific methods for collecting and analyzing cost data.
Child Welfare Evaluation Virtual Summit Series
Children's Bureau (2014)
Presents a group of 17 videos that combine illustration, animation, motion graphics, and content from national experts. Each video tackles a particular evaluation-related topic and many propose solutions to common evaluation problems.
The National Child Welfare Workforce Institute Leadership Competency Framework
National Child Welfare Workforce Institute (updated 2011)
Presents a research-informed leadership competency framework adapted to reflect the multidimensional nature of the child welfare field. This guide defines competencies for five domains (leading change, leading in context, leading people, leading for results, and fundamental competencies) and provides proficiency ladders with examples for each.
Learning and Living Leadership: A Tool Kit
National Child Welfare Workforce Institute (2013)
Presents on-the-job activities to help develop leadership skills by reinforcing and practicing competencies from the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute's Leadership Competency Framework. Agencies may use this toolkit, which targets leadership in child welfare at multiple levels, as a stand-alone aid or as a way to supplement other agency professional development programs.
Advice to a New Child Services Leader
Payne (2011)
Indiana Department of Child Services
Shares lessons learned from Judge James W. Payne based on his 25 years as a juvenile court judge and then a State child welfare agency director. This paper captures insights and advice in the areas of leadership, administration, communication, and data, which both new and experienced child welfare directors, as well as managers, may find useful.
Positioning Public Child Welfare Guidance: Leadership
American Public Human Services Association (2012)
Offers guidance to public child welfare directors and their executive teams on where they should spend their time and energy, how to assess and align critical processes (e.g., human resources) to support agency strategy, and how to embed leadership throughout an agency.
Positioning Public Child Welfare Guidance: Public Policy
American Public Human Services Association (2012)
Provides guidance to staff charged with developing an agency's policy agenda and to executives responsible for approving and implementing the proposed course of action. This guidance specifically addresses the development of policies required to operationalize an agency's practice model. The Positioning Public Child Welfare Guidance online tool also includes a Public Policy Reflective Thinking Guide and related resources.
Positioning Public Child Welfare Guidance: Administrative Practices
American Public Human Services Association (2012)
Describes strategies and implementation ideas to support administrative functions that are effective and well received in guiding the agency. This section of the Positioning Public Child Welfare Guidance online tool highlights pragmatic guidance to the critical interdependent relationships and functions between administrative and program staff. The tool also includes an Administrative Practices Reflective Thinking Guide.
Workforce Development Planning and Assessment Toolkit
National Child Welfare Workforce Institute (2017)
Applies the principles of the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute's Workforce Development Framework (see related brief) to an agency setting and offers a comprehensive and integrated approach for creating a workforce development roadmap. The online toolkit introduces tools to gather information about the agency's current workforce strengths and gaps, explores workforce development components, presents strategies to close gaps, and guides action plan development.
Coaching Toolkit for Child Welfare Practice
Northern California Training Academy, University of California Davis Extension Center for Human Services and Casey Family Programs (2012)
Provides information on how to learn and apply coaching skills, approaches, models, and foundational theories.
Coaching in Child Welfare
Capacity Building Center for States (2017)
Helps child welfare administrators, managers, and supervisors understand the potential role of coaching in supporting their workforce. This issue brief discusses coaching functions, models, and strategies and presents considerations for developing and implementing coaching programs.
Racial Disproportionality and Disparity in Child Welfare
Child Welfare Information Gateway (2016)
Explores the prevalence of racial disproportionality and disparity in the child welfare system. Following an overview of research and data, this issue brief describes strategies that can assist child welfare administrators, program managers, and policymakers with addressing these issues in general and at specific decision points in the child welfare process. This issue brief also highlights examples of State and local initiatives that address disproportionality.
Strategies to Reduce Racially Disparate Outcomes in Child Welfare
Center for the Study of Social Policy (2015)
Describes the results of a national scan of strategies used to promote racial equity among children and families involved with the child welfare system. This guide provides specific State examples of these strategies.
CW360 Culturally Responsive Child Welfare Practice
Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare (2015)
Explores “cultural responsiveness,” a term used to reflect the idea that child welfare professionals need to identify and nurture the unique cultural strengths, beliefs, and practices of each family with whom they work and integrate that knowledge into intervention approaches. This collection of articles focuses primarily on culturally responsive practice with American Indian and African-American families. The articles also address culturally informed practice, innovative community practices, and the personal impact of addressing culture.
Building Capacity to Manage Change and Improve Child Welfare Practice
Child Welfare Capacity Building Collaborative (2015)
Describes the Collaborative's evidence-informed approach to the change and implementation process. This process has five phases: (1) identify and assess needs; (2) develop theory of change; (3) develop or select solution; (4) plan, prepare, and implement; and (5) evaluate and apply findings.
Development, Implementation, and Assessment Toolkit
Permanency Innovations Initiative Training and Technical Assistance Project (2016)
(Available through CapLEARN; users need to register and scroll down through course catalog)
Features interactive modules that provide comprehensive information about each step in a 10-step implementation process. Informed by best practices in implementation science, this web-based toolkit includes exercises to reinforce key concepts, automated tools, and videos of child welfare experts discussing lessons learned from implementing innovations.
Active Implementation Hub
National Implementation Research Network (2013-17)
Provides short online modules with content, activities, and assessments designed to promote the knowledge and practice of implementation science and scaling up of programs and innovations. Self-paced modules address implementation drivers, implementation teams, implementation stages, improvement cycles, usable innovations, and fidelity assessment.
The Center chose these resources based on relevance, utility, and accessibility. This collection does not address all organizational resources subdimensions. Reference to any specific product, process, service, or company does not constitute its endorsement by the Children’s Bureau.