Cross-System Collaboration

When professionals work, interact, and exchange information with parents who are incarcerated and who have children involved in the child welfare system, they must also work with the correctional system and detention facilities (prisons). This podcast features a conversation between those with experience on both sides of the working relationship between the child welfare and correctional systems. 

The growing emphasis on recognizing, addressing, and preventing human trafficking is an emerging issue challenging many government and human service agencies. Child welfare is especially affected because children and youth placed in out-of-home care due to abuse and neglect, along with runaway and homeless youth, are at high risk of trafficking. Listen to this podcast to learn more.

Children who lack stable and permanent housing are at greater risk of neglect or being placed in out-of-home care than children who don't. Child welfare professionals are challenged in working with families experiencing homelessness; meeting the requirements of a case plan can be more difficult for families struggling to obtain safe and affordable housing. Listen to this podcast to learn more.

Families and children make up approximately one-third of the homeless population in the United States. These families are at greater risk of entering the child welfare system and face greater challenges in working toward reunification than families involved in child welfare who have stable housing. Listen to this podcast to learn more.

When courts, child welfare agencies, and their partners use multidisciplinary, family-centered approaches, children can spend less time in foster care and achieve permanency, reunification, or guardianship more quickly.

Proactively trying to prevent harm to children from occurring is the focus of primary prevention, a set of strategies or programs to stop maltreatment before it happens that can be accessed by and benefit all members of the community

Any child welfare professional can attest to the fact that engagement is both an art and a science. Engaging tribes and Tribal families, as with any type of engagement, is all about relationships.

This article presents strategies to help agencies and courts work together to address common challenges, and provides an example of how one state put some of these strategies into practice.

By respecting tribes as equal partners with unique cultures, values, needs, and expertise, state child welfare agencies can build more equitable child welfare systems and improve outcomes for children, young people, and families.

Many youth and young people in and transitioning out of care need help accessing high-quality educational opportunities and achieving their academic goals.