Providing strategic consulting and technical assistance to child welfare agencies to keep children safe, strengthen the connections between children and their families and improve children’s long-term success.
More than686,000children each year experience abuse and neglect. The Child Welfare Strategy Group (CWSG) provides intensive consulting to child welfare agencies to ensure that they provide effective assistance to struggling children and families. We know that:
CWSG helps child welfare agencies, practitioners and policymakers do better by children and families who experiencefoster care. Our team of consultants:
Learn howthree child welfare agencies use Team Decision Makingto improve the quality of placement decision making for children who come to their attention. Today,the National Council on Crime and Deliquency is managing TDM.
Connecticutplaced more children with family members and decreased the number of children in unnecessary group placements.
An improved service array can reduce child removals, asHampton, Virginia, has proven.
Virginiacut the number of children in group care, provided 60% more local intervention services and decreased child welfare costs by 5.8%.
Reforming practice was crucial toIndiana’s child welfare transformation.
Learning to engage family members helpedimprove outcomes for Maine’s children.
Four states use a Casey-developed approach to reduce group placementsand spark larger system transformations.
High-performing child welfare agencies have something in common. An urgent attention to how children in their care are doing—and continuously measuring their outcomes.
Based on our public agency consulting experience and input from leaders nationwide, Casey has compiled 10 key child welfare practices, providing detailed recommendations and standards.
A Child Welfare Leader’s Desk Guide to Building a High-Performing Agencydescribes these 10 critical practices and provides metrics to help agencies, advocates,governors, legislators and others take a snapshot of how they are doing and chart a course for improvement.
Part onedescribes 10 practices and outcomes for measuring where an agency stands compared to others in the field.
Part twolinks to research and tools agency staff members can use to make the case for change and implement new approaches. Appendices provide information on related topics, such as how to upgrade agency data collection andhow to measure racial and other disparities.
Frontline practice improvements and family teaming solutions. Wehelp agencies work more effectively with children and families,keep teens from entering carebecause of conflict with their parents and make sure thatteens leaving foster care have family support.
Assessing child well-being. Are children’s needs being met by child welfare agencies and providers? We aretesting a new toolto find out.
Rethinking child welfare placements.We work with agencies to care for most children in families instead of group settings.
Kinship policy, practice and data tools. We promote revising licensing requirementsso more relatives can care for childrenwhen their parents cannot.
Foster family recruitment and support. We help agencies implementchild-specific and targeted recruitment strategies, strengthen foster family training and support andencourage positive relationships between birth and foster parents.
Provider partnerships. Public and private child welfare providers can work together to get good results for children and families.
Outcomes performance management. We help child welfare agencies establish performance andqualitative standards; we also provide training and coaching on using data to improve services designed to help children and families.
Financial reinvestment. We help child welfare leaders maximize federal, state and local funding,shifting funds from high-cost crisis interventions to effective, prevention-focused services.
Based on its experience with leading child welfare reforms, the Casey Foundation developed the following training programs for those working with children and youth in foster care:
ARC Reflections Training Program
A nine-session program that child welfare agencies can use to train foster parents to better care for children who have had traumatic experiences.
Engaging Kinship Caregivers With Joseph Crumbley
A five-part video training series to strengthen the skills of child welfare professionals in supporting families to improve outcomes for children.
Trauma Systems Therapy for Foster Care
This four-part training curriculum gives child welfare agencies a tool that foster parents can use to support children in their care and help them heal.
A new report funded by the Foundation discusses alternative high school models and the growing demand for alternative pathways to high school completion.
An Instagram Live conversation explores the need for solutions that reduce reliance on group placements and shorten young people’s time in care.
A podcast episode explores how former foster youth and their yearning for legal, loving and lifelong relationships led to a new permanency option called SOUL Family.
Joan Kaufman, Ph.D., of Yale University School of Medicine, on applying research on child development to child welfare placement practices
The Foundation'sTracey Feildsays that what's best for kids — living with families — is also good for state budgets. Download herpresentation to the National Governors Association.
When Child Welfare Worksoutlines a policy framework and recommendations to align federal child welfare financing with best practices.
