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| NCCWE Weekly Update 2/18/2015 |
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Data-driven Diligent Recruitment: Partnering and Prioritizing to Strengthen Your System’s Use of Data
Wednesday, February 25, 2015 (3:00-4:00 PM EST / 12:00-1:00 PM PST)
This free webinar from the National Resource Center for Diligent Recruitment at AdoptUSKids will help child welfare systems explore ways to build your capacity to use data effectively to inform your recruitment, development, and support of foster, adoptive, and kinship families to meet the needs of children and youth in care. Many child welfare systems have extensive data on the children in foster care but lack data on how prospective families move through the process from recruitment to licensure or approval and beyond. This webinar will provide strategies for advancing cross-unit collaboration and prioritizing data needed to strengthen your system’s use of data. Child welfare program staff and data/IT staff are both encouraged to attend this webinar.
On this webinar we will:
- Share strategies and resources for partnering between child welfare program staff and data division staff;
- Discuss important resource family data elements to collect and analyze to help you understand the effectiveness of your family recruitment, development, and support, and share ideas about different possible approaches to begin collecting and understanding this data;
- Highlight a real example from Arizona, a state child welfare system that is demonstrating the power of a strong partnership between data and program staff to inform data-driven recruitment efforts; and,
- Offer suggestions for useful tools to support your child welfare system’s efforts to use data to guide your recruitment strategies and implementation.
Registration is now open at: https://cc.readytalk.com/r/6t90ent8bb77&eom |
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State-by-State Adoption Data Available
NACAC, through the State Policy Advocacy and Reform Center (SPARC), has published state adoption factsheets based primarily on 2012 AFCARS data. Each of the factsheets includes information about the number of waiting children, the number of adopted children, lengths of stay, race and ethnic background of waiting and adopted children, and more.
http://www.nacac.org/policy/statefactsheets.html |
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Advocates for Families First Hosts Webinar on Collaboration
On February 27 at noon central time, Advocates for Families First presents a free webinar — Effective Collaboration for System Improvement. The most effective advocacy efforts are those that bring together both disparate and like-minded advocates, who can speak with one voice. For Advocates for Families First, the ability to unite youth, kinship caregivers, and foster and adoptive parents is essential to our success. It may be the missing link to your efforts as well. The presenters (Kim Stevens, Jaia Lent, and Jean Fiorito) will have courageous conversations about the biases and fears that each of us holds, discuss strategies to diffuse those challenging beliefs, and share language and tools for effectively achieving positive change through collaboration.
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4850895032961179905 |
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New Law's Provision Promotes Well-Being for Youth in Care
Research has shown that engaging in extracurricular, social, and cultural activities helps promote a sense of normalcy among youth in foster care. While these activities have been shown to support their social, cognitive, and emotional development, youth in care often face legal barriers to participating in certain activities in the same ways their classmates and other peers do. Among the provisions of the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act (P.L. 113-183), signed into law September 29, 2014, is a requirement for States to implement a "reasonable and prudent parent standard" that will empower foster parents or other designated decision-makers to make decisions to allow youth in foster care to participate in healthy and developmentally appropriate activities such as field trips, sleepovers, and other extracurricular activities. This standard is intended to expand opportunities for youth in care to engage in activities that will promote their well-being. Promoting Well-Being Through the Reasonable and Prudent Parent Standard: A Guide for States Implementing the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act (H.R. 4980) is available at
http://www.cssp.org/policy/2014/A-GUIDE-FOR-STATES-IMPLEMENTING-THE-PREVENTING-SEX-TRAFFICKING-AND-STRENGTHENING-FAMILIES-ACT-HR-4980.pdf |
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Engaging Families Through Family Team Meetings
Four Approaches to Family Team Meetings was designed to help child welfare professionals understand the concepts behind and components of Family Group Decision-Making, Family Team Conferencing, Permanency Teaming, and Team Decision-Making Meetings. The paper includes tables that describe each approach's structure and components and draw comparisons among the components. Professionals can use this paper in their efforts to determine which approach might best help them to improve family outcomes.
Access Four Approaches to Family Team Meetings on the Annie E. Casey Foundation website at
http://www.aecf.org/m/resourcedoc/FourApproachestoFamilyTeamMeetings.pdf
For more information on family engagement and family team meetings, explore Child Welfare Information Gateway's Family Engagement Inventory at
https://www.childwelfare.gov/FEI/program-strategies/ |
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What Happens to Siblings in the Care System?
This report investigates the current experience of siblings in the care system and whether some placement types are more likely than others to enable siblings to be raised together. It also explores how many foster care providers are siblings of the children they are raising.
Ashley, Cathy. Roth, David. Family Rights Group. Kinship Care Alliance. 2015
http://www.frg.org.uk/images/PDFS/siblings-in-care-final-report-january-2015.pdf |
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The NCCWE Weekly Update is emailed to all subscribers every Wednesday. We urge subscribers to share this information with colleagues in the field. This service is brought to the child welfare community free of charge by the National Center for Child Welfare Excellence at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College.
To subscribe, visit http://www.nccwe.org/BPR/weekly-update.html
Gerald P. Mallon, DSW, LCSW
Julia Lathrop Professor of Child Welfare
Executive Director
National Center for Child Welfare Excellence
Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College
A Service of the Children's Bureau
2180 Third Avenue. 7th Floor
New York, NY 10035
http://www.nccwe.org
mallong@aol.com |
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