**Children’s Bureau: Activities on Family Engagement**

**The Children’s Bureau facilitates family engagement in the national child welfare program through technical assistance, supporting program innovation and monitoring.  Following are highlights of some of the many activities in which the Bureau is engaged.**

**Training and Technical Assistance**

The Children’s Bureau provides comprehensive support to States, Tribes, communities, and child welfare professionals through its Training and Technical Assistance (T&TA) Network. Members of the T&TA Network work closely together to build the capacity of State, Tribal, and local child welfare agencies through coordinated training, technical assistance, research, and consultation services. National Resource Centers (NRCs) provide topical T&TA to States and Tribes to address key issues related to child welfare service delivery.  Specific Resource Center activities to highlight include:

*National Resource Center for Community-Based Child Abuse Prevention*: has established a Parent Advisory Council to provide useful overall program direction and guidance to the activities of the Resource Center. Committee members share their experience and expertise in child abuse prevention and family strengthening through their active participation in workgroups and the annual Grantee’s meeting, development/review of written materials, and by providing resource

center staff with consultation and advice.

*National Resource Center on Permanency and Family Connections* has expanded its consultant team to include family members, (i.e., birth parents, foster and adoptive parents, and kinship caregivers), who have firsthand experience with the child welfare system, and are now able to use that experience to help child welfare agencies identify and strengthen meaningful family engagement strategies within the case plan, to develop programs to engage families as partners in child welfare decision-making, and to include family voices in the development of policies and procedures. Currently, there are six family Engagement Consultants working with NRCPFC. 

*National Workforce Advisory Workgroup* and *National Child Welfare Workforce Institute* have parent partners who participate in the Leadership Academy for Middle Managers as trainers and provide information on engaging families.

*National Resource Center on In Home Services*, has parents engaged in their National Advisory board annual meetings.

**Supporting Program Innovation**

The Children’s Bureau awards discretionary grants for research and program development through a competitive peer-review process to State and local agencies, Tribes, faith-based and community-based organizations, and other non-profit and for-profit groups.  Some of these include:

*National Quality Improvement Center on Non-Resident Fathers:*Targets identifying effective practices that improve child welfare outcomes by involving non-resident fathers in their children's cases. The QIC assesses needs and resources, then plans and implements research and demonstration activities to develop knowledge about improving child welfare outcomes by involving non-resident fathers.

*Using Comprehensive Family Assessments to Improve Child Welfare Outcomes*: Demonstrates the implementation of the Comprehensive Family Assessment Guidelines, implementing comprehensive assessments of children, youth, and families served by public child welfare agencies as a means of improving the provision of services and the outcomes of services, including the effectiveness of caseworker

visits.

*Improving Service Delivery to Youth in the Child Welfare System*: Supports the effective implementation of strategies to help youth at risk of aging out or who are 18-21 and still involved with the child welfare system to develop skills to strengthen and manage relationships with biological family members and other important individuals in their lives.

*Family Connection Discretionary Grants*: Provides for services or activities for the purpose of helping children who are in, or at risk of entering foster care, to reconnect with family members. Services may include the following:

· A kinship navigator program to assist kinship caregivers in learning about, finding and using programs and services to meet the needs of the children they raising and their own needs, and to promote effective partnerships among public and private agencies to ensure kinship caregiver families are served;

· Intensive family-finding efforts that utilize search technology to find biological family members for children in the child welfare system;

· Family group decision-making meetings for children in the child welfare system that enable families to make decisions and develop plans that nurture and protect them from abuse and neglect; and 

· Residential family treatment program that enable parents and their children to live in a safe environment for a period of not less than six months.

*Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect through Nurse Home Visitation*: Aims to prevent child abuse and neglect by providing nurse home visitation services and by providing or referring parents who would benefit from them to healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood services. Funded programs employ strong partnerships with child abuse prevention, child welfare, family support, and other disciplines to implement and evaluate this combination of services. Families who need them also receive services to address substance abuse, mental health, and family violence issues.

**Monitoring**

The Children’s Bureau employs a comprehensive monitoring protocol (Child and Family Services Review)  that assesses State child welfare systems’ compliance with Federal requirements in a manner that leads to positive outcomes for children and families.  As part of its assessment of state systems, the Children’s Bureau pulls a sample of cases, the review of which includes interviews with children, parents and foster parents to, among other things, determine if there  is appropriate family involvement in case planning and worker/client contact.  States that do not meet certain thresholds are engaged in program improvement and ultimately face penalties for failure to make agreed upon improvement.  The process serves to promote family engagement and involvement as a regular component of every day social work practice.

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