The Fathers and Continuous Learning in Child Welfare (FCL) project sought to improve placement stability and permanency outcomes for children by engaging their fathers and paternal relatives. FCL implemented a methodology known as the Breakthrough Series Collaborative (BSC), a continuous learning methodology. The last in a three-part series, this podcast discusses strategies in the BSC within Prowers County, Colorado. Topics discussed include:

• The flexibility and innovation small child welfare agencies can have in comparison to larger, more bureaucratic agencies
• The collective accountability child welfare and partner human service agencies shared in Prowers County to engage and involve fathers and paternal families in their casework and prevention efforts
• The "must-haves" necessary to spark and sustain culture change

Family-engaged case planning is a new model for the initial stage of the juvenile probation process where juvenile probation officers formulate case plans by collaborating with young people and their families. This approach is necessary to align probation with powerful studies on adolescent brain development and effective responses to delinquent behavior. This Practice Guide covers:

• Why family engagement is important—and a departure from the status quo.
• Three stages of the family-engaged case planning model.
• Advice on adapting this model to local jurisdictions.
• Six common challenges to meaningfully engaging families.

This comprehensive child welfare resource provides state and national data on child maltreatment, foster care, kinship caregiving, and adoption from foster care. Data profiles are available by state. Also available for download is a companion guide which explains how stakeholders can interpret and use the data.

Research has shown that policies and practices in the child care subsidy system can prevent families from accessing and keeping child care benefits that ensure their children receive care in stable, quality settings. This fact sheet highlights lessons from research and seven ways states can make child care more accessible and equitable for families and more efficient for agencies:

• Examine customer service flexibility, quality, and efficiency
• Simplify application, reporting, and verification requirements
• Change eligibility thresholds
• Talk with parents, providers, and caseworkers to identify barriers to subsidy access and retention
• Improve coordination across programs
• Align and integrate policies and systems across programs
• Build data, information, and reporting capacity.

Providing access to tangible resources can strengthen families and communities by avoiding and de-escalating crises, reducing parental stress, increasing access to safe housing and reliable childcare, and ensuring children have the material items they need to thrive. This brief discusses the impact of community-based strategies, connections, and collaborations that offer economic supports to address families’ basic needs, keeping children safe and families together. These include housing supports, food assistance, financial supports, employment assistance, early care and education services, legal services, and medical and behavioral health care.

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Mathematica, and The Adjacent Possible will jointly host a webinar on March 14, 2022 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:15 p.m. ET to highlight innovative strategies used by state and local TANF programs during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic to adapt service delivery and promote staff and client well-being. Speakers will share the findings of two briefs published by Project SPARK (Supporting Partnerships to Advance Research and Knowledge). The webinar will be interactive with two primary purposes for participants: engage in a sense-making exercise with the research themes, and explore ways of applying and experimenting with the innovations.

The child welfare-to-prison pipeline describes the systems that funnel youth from the child welfare system into the juvenile justice system. The child welfare system often targets and disproportionately surveils black and brown families—largely those living in poverty and dealing with the challenges of mental health, substance use, and over-policing by the criminal legal system. The National Association of Counsel for Children (NACC) will host a webinar on March 22, 2022 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. ET. Speakers will stress the importance of strengthening community resources and preventing family disintegration as a tool to end the child welfare-to-prison pipeline. There is a registration fee for non-NACC members to attend this webinar.

The Administration for Children and Families will host a webinar on March 14, 2022 from 2:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET which will discuss approaches to supporting, growing, and strengthening the early childhood workforce in tribal communities. Tribal communities seek to ensure that early childhood program staff have the language, cultural, and community knowledge to implement culturally grounded programs that meet the needs of American Indian/Alaska Native children and families. They also have a strong interest in “growing their own” workforce by supporting members of the community, including former program participants, to become early childhood professionals. In the webinar, participants will hear an overview of issues related to supporting and strengthening the early childhood workforce in tribal communities, followed by a panel highlighting innovations and promising practices. Additionally, participants will be able to learn more about and discuss highlighted strategies with peers and hear about resources they can use in their own communities.

The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) hosted the Using the Pandemic Emergency Assistance Fund webinar on March 8 and 9, 2022. Separate sessions were held for states, tribes, and territories that administer PEAF funds. Established by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, PEAF provides funding to states, tribes administering a TANF program, and all five U.S. territories to assist needy families impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic to use funds to provide certain non-recurrent, short term benefits.

During these webinars, OFA shared its newly developed brief, Responding to Winter Utility Needs: Using the Pandemic Emergency Assistance Fund and discussed how PEAF grantees can blend and braid PEAF allocations with other federal funds to help families with high utility costs. Current PEAF grantees also shared their PEAF experiences, and the webinar concluded with a facilitated discussion.

In this webinar, participants:

• Learned different approaches for distributing PEAF-funded cash assistance.
• Explored how COVID-19 impacted energy security for low-income families and how the Pandemic Emergency Assistance Fund can help.
• Heard from PEAF grantees who have allocated resources to help low-income families with utility assistance and other needs.

Each webinar was tailored to states, tribes, and territories administering PEAF resources.

Please note: Webinar recording for territories is unavailable. Please review the PowerPoint slides and/or watch the recording of the state webinar (see link below).

This playbook, developed in collaboration between the National Community Action Partnership and the American Public Human Services Association, explores how Community Action and human services agencies partnered together in response to the COVID-19 public health and economic crisis. It presents opportunities for alignment in providing whole family supports, making career pathways possible for SNAP recipients, and tackling structural inequities in accessing services. Examples of these alignments include western Maryland and Virginia (whole family supports), Minnesota and Oregon (SNAP Employment & Training), and rural Ohio and Montgomery County, Maryland (dismantling structural inequities).