July 24th Child Welfare Committee Stakeholder meeting minutes Commission on Disproportionality in Youth Services
Child Welfare Sub Committee
Stakeholder Meeting Summary
July 24, 2008
Co-Chairs: Angela Green, Dr. Jim Kenny
Commission Members Present:
Angela Green
Roderick Wheeler
Geneva Osawe
JauNae Hanger
Hon. Mary Beth Bonaventura
Gregg Ellis
Jennifer Darby
Others Present
Dr. Jackie Green, Commission Researcher and Stakeholder meeting facilitator
Rev. CL Day, Child Welfare sub-committee
David Rozzell, Juvenile Justice sub-committee co-chair
Community Stakeholders Present
Katherine V. Byers, IU School of Social Work
David Orentlicher, IN General Assembly
Phyllis Kikendall, DCS Prevention Services
Delores Kennedy-Williams, White’s RFS
Alfreda Singleton-Smith, The Villages
Gail Folaron, IU School of Social Work
Sandy Runkle, Prevent Child Abuse Indiana
Elizabeth Malone, Stopover Inc.
Elder Lionel T. Rush, Shepherd of Families
Merlin Jones-Smaller, Minority Specialized Care Inc.
Karen D. Reid, IUPUI
Brant L. Ping, Child and Adolescent Placement Project
Cathy Graham, IARCCA
Ron. D. Carpenter, Children’s Bureau
Edie Olsen, Family Service of Central Indiana
John Brandon, McCoy Inc.
Michelle Clarke, IUPUI Educational Success Program
Dr. Alton Strange, Lutheran Child and Family Services
Pastor R.E. Willoughby, Concerned Clergy
Jennifer Kinnaman, Children’s Bureau
Dr. Lorraine Blackman, IU School of Social Work
Sharon Pierce, The Villages
Rev. David Greene, Sr., 2nd Baptist Church
Rev. Bruce Farr, Overcoming Church
Gael Deppert, JDAI
Welcome and Introductions
Angela Green welcomed participants to the Stakeholder meeting and provided an overview of the Commission’s work. She then introduced Dr. Jackie Green, facilitator for the Stakeholder meeting.
Dr. Green shared the agenda and reviewed the goals for the meeting: to look at disproportionality in the child welfare system from the perspectives of prevention, preservation, placement and permanency; to gather information about strengths, challenges and needs; and to hear recommendations for going forward. The first part of the meeting will be devoted to fact-gathering from panels of experts representing each of the child welfare perspectives. The second part of the meeting will be devoted to small group discussion and formulation of recommendations.
Dr. Green thanked Rev. CL Day of NOAH Inc. and the Children’s Bureau for providing lunch.
Presentation: Prevention Panel
Jennifer Kinnaman, Children’s Bureau
I am director of the ACT services program in Johnson County and also supervise the Healthy Families program. Both programs are child abuse and neglect prevention programs that offer free, voluntary home-based services to families. The target population for the Healthy Families program is pregnant women and women with children age 0-3 months, but the program can follow these children up to 3-5 years of age. The Neighborhood Alliance for Child Safety (NACS) target population is children age 0-18 provides short term crisis intervention and linkages to resources. This program served 851 families in Marion County in 2007 and those families were 40% white, 40% black and 20% Latino.
Phyllis Kikendall, DCS Prevention Services
Indiana has had Healthy Families programs since 1994. Our staff is culturally diverse and all of our materials are built around cultural competency. Last year, Marion County Healthy Families served approximately 980 families and of those 57% were African American. Of the 4000 African American births in Marion County, about 75% were screened by the program. Our target is the high risk families in Marion County and these families are approximately 27% Latino and 18% white. To meet the needs of our target population we ensure that the agencies we contract with hire culturally diverse and culturally competent staff.
We also have a project with the Administration for Children and Families (ACF). This project looks at single mothers with new births. It is part of a national research project with Mathmatica which has trained our facilitators to work with families. In this program the father and mother commit to a parenting program of 28 group sessions. Data suggests that when Indiana can engage both parents to commit to the program, they stay longer than in any of the other states in the research project. In Allen County, there are forty couples on a waiting list for this program. The goal of the project is that parents will provide good parenting but also that they will stay together as a family and ultimately marry.
Sandy Runkle, Prevent Child Abuse Indiana
Prevent Child Abuse Indiana is the primary prevention arm of The Villages which means that we serve everyone. We focus on education and try not to use the term “at risk” to describe the families we are trying to reach. We believe that all families have “risk factors” and all families need support regardless of race or income level. We also recognize that our state has become very diverse and so we have developed written materials in Spanish and are doing presentations in Spanish. We also have developed a brochure about fatherhood that is geared toward African American males and we sit on a sub-committee of the Indiana State of Our Black Youth (SOBY). In cooperation with SOBY, the Indiana Mental Health Association and the Children’s Bureau we have produced a film called “I Never Meant” which focuses on the stressors faced by an African American family and has an associated curriculum.
Sharon Pierce, Healthy Families Indiana Think Tank
The Healthy Families Indiana Think Tank provides statewide strategic planning and is one of the Healthy Families partners in Lake County. We are excited about focusing on the areas of immunizations for children and helping parents complete their education. The work we do is framed around the question of “what’s the future going to be for me as a child in this family?” We also have an initiative called “Indiana Kids Can’t Wait” which is trying to emphasize the message that “it is a sign of strength to ask for help as a parent.”
Elizabeth Malone, Stopover Inc.
Stopover provides crisis intervention with adolescents and their families to prevent youth from entering the child welfare or juvenile justice system. We offer a 24 hour crisis line and emergency shelter for youth and are just beginning a transitional living program for older youth. The Stopover program began as a youth-centered program but since 1982 has evolved to a family-centered program focusing on supporting families to support their children. In addition to emergency shelter for youth we provide intensive home-based services during the crisis with the goal of developing a plan for the child’s return. We provide after care services through counseling, support services such as summer enrichment programs and services to youth who are at risk of not completing school. In terms of the challenges, the families we serve are facing many stressors in this economy and in raising adolescents in this society.
Dr. Alton Strange, Lutheran Child and Family Services
I have learned that disproportionality is associated with economic and educational circumstances. The children who come to us are likely to have witnessed violence and suffer from physical, emotional and sexual abuse. There is a counter-culture in which being street-wise is the most important thing. When youth arrive at the residential program, our job is to provide a therapeutic milieu of safety and stability. We work with youth on a 6-9 month time frame so they can return to a less restrictive environment such as home or foster care. We create treatment plans that are attainable and engage the youth as a partner in their own treatment. We try to help youth assume responsibility for their own behavior, build on their strengths and help them develop their talents.
Dr. Green opened the discussion for questions. Angela Green asked each presenter to estimate the percentage of families of color served in their prevention and what would be needed to increase that percentage.
Elizabeth Malone
Last year 71% of participants in our program were African American. That is an increase over the previous year. We need more resources especially home-based counselors. We sometimes have a waiting list for counseling services. We could increase participation through additional outreach and marketing.
Jennifer Kinnaman
Last year the NACS program participants were 40% African American and 20% Latino. We need more bilingual staff. For African American families we would like to increase outreach efforts in specific Indianapolis neighborhoods that we are not reaching now.
Dr. Alton Strange
Lutheran Child and Family Services would like to expand its family based services. We are in Phase 2 of building our “Family Strengthening Center.” This program will provide services such as job training and counseling to parents. We are also moving resources out into the community, providing independent living and recreation services. Our client population is 78- 80% African American. We would like to have the resources to start a mentoring program.
Phyllis Kikendall
Statewide Healthy Families clients are about 10% African American. In Marion, Lake and Allen Counties we target families of color and the percentage is higher: about 57% in Marion and Lake Counties. In terms of increasing those numbers, we try to serve as many families as possible with the resources we have.
Sandy Runkle
It is hard to know what percentage of minority families we reach. Each year we do go to Fiesta where we distribute materials to the Hispanic population. We have a “Nurturing Fathers” program for incarcerated fathers which served 30% African and Hispanic men last year. We also have children’s theater program whose audiences are approximately 75% children of color. The “I Never Meant” video is designed to reach families of color. With our educational programs we have two Hispanic staff who specialize in shaken baby syndrome prevention.
Sharon Pierce
In Lake County, Healthy Families clients are about 70% families of color. We try to build relationships with WIC Centers and hospital programs. With the 1-800 number and “Kids Can’t Wait” initiative we are targeting African American leaders to reach out to their communities with our message.
Roderick Wheeler posed the question “Why do you need resource?” followed by the question “why?” five times. Responses: We need additional staff and staff support services. Why? So that we can reach more families. Why? So that those families can be supportive to their children so their children can have a good life and not end up in the system. Mr. Wheeler noted that this is the level we need to thinking at.
Presentation: Preservation Panel
John Brandon, McCoy Inc.
Marion County Commission on Youth is not a service agency, it is an intermediary agency. The way to keep youth from coming into the system is to help them grow up well by making sure that youth and families have access to information regarding services. McCoy Inc. is developing a new on-line resource that will allow all youth development agencies to describe what they do and will also create a data base of organizations that can assist decision makers in determining what resources are needed.
Dr. Lorraine Blackman
There was an incident in Central Park in the late 1980s where a jogger was attacked and beaten by a group of African American youth. I remember a time when that sort of thing was unheard of in the black community and it caused me to ask what has happened to child socialization in the black community. Children have not changed; what has changed are child-rearing processes. Poverty does not cause parents to rear children poorly. In 1965 we were poor but we didn’t have children in these systems; in fact these systems were not developed with us in mind so child rearing processes in the past did not include social services. We need to get back to empowering families to do their job: have children, rear them, nurture them, provide emotional and economic support and teach and protect them from sex until they’re ready for it. There are two barriers to African Americans in doing those jobs. One is an intergenerational pattern of trauma which leads to depression, addiction, hypertension etc. In Indiana we have few trauma-related (rape crisis, domestic violence, addiction etc.) services. The other barrier is that most people are not equipped for family life; they don’t know about picking a mate, being married, parenting and basic child development. We need to address this. Research shows that African Americans are community-oriented. They like coming to classes that don’t designate them as mentally ill.
Edie Olsen, Family Service of Central Indiana
Family Services provides family counseling and domestic violence services including batterer treatment, parenting education classes, alcohol and substance abuse treatment and specialized groups that address trauma and substance abuse. We have a family loan program to help low income families with meeting needs such as buying a car. We also have home-based services designed to keep families from being separated or reunify them if they have been separated. The strength we find in our programs is that they work. Our service outcomes are excellent and client satisfaction is measured at over 90% even though most of clients are mandated to services. Our family preservation services are culturally relevant and we address barriers by serving clients in their home, providing bus tokens and child care, etc. Family preservation services are less costly and less traumatic to children and directly address the core issues that bring families to the attention of the child welfare system. DCS practice reforms such as the child and family team meeting process are strengths in that they are much more supportive of family preservation. Our challenges in reducing disproportionality include the fact that we sometimes reach families too late and we lack resources to do outreach; it is hard to recruit staff especially males, African Americans and Latinos; we lack funds to provide sufficient cultural competency training; and documentation and accountability requirements have become burdensome to meet.
Geneva Osawe, Family Matters Institute
Deficit-based models of treatment are not effective with African American families. Models that do work are family system-based and strength-based. Legislative changes in 1997 placed a time limit on serving families in the child welfare system and this posed a challenge to the systems working with black families.
In terms of disproportionality strengths, black families are unique: they use the community as extended family and have a strong spiritual base and sense of hope. In terms of disproportionality challenges, many black families would like to work with the system but because of past history they are distrustful. Often there are family members who are willing to care for children but current rules and regulations do not allow that to happen. Another challenge is the emergence of the “new poor” who are plagued by unemployment, substance abuse, social isolation, racism, community violence and poor school systems. Over the past 5-7 years many new child placement agencies have moved into northwest Indiana. What is the main objective of placement agencies: is it reunification of families or termination of parental rights?
My recommendations include: provide training in the use of Eco-Maps; reduce duplication of services by several providers working with the same family; require providers to work together using a team meeting process; provide cultural competency training in higher education programs; increase early intervention services; allow treatment providers to determine the best interventions for families; recruit black foster families; educate biological parents about their rights and the process from the time of removal; stop removing every child who tests positive for marijuana; and do not allow child-placing agencies to be service providers.
David Rozzell asked the panel to discuss the historical processes that have impacted the African American family. Dr. Blackman responded that the Viet Nam war had a great impact in terms of fathers returning with drug problems and post-traumatic stress disorder. The civil rights movement had a major impact in its insistence on help with issues of poverty in urban areas and the Deep South. Mr. Rozzell noted that economics (lack of economic stability and resulting need to depend on social services) seem to be at the core of the problem.
Presentation: Placement Panel
Cathy Graham, IARCCA
One challenge is that agencies struggle to find the resources they need to function in a changing environment. Minority-owned agencies have struggled to keep their doors open. IARCCA has an Outcomes Project through which member agencies collect data and which has identified protective factors for children in the African American community. Another challenge is that we tend to focus on risk factors rather than strengths and we are currently researching tools to help us identify family strengths. We are seeing an increase of agency leaders who are minorities but the recruitment of minority staff, especially licensed clinicians remains a challenge. One of our strengths is our “Parents Guide to the CHINS Process” which has been translated into Spanish. A challenge is the fact that minority children spend more time in care and more time waiting for adoption. My recommendations include: agencies need to make better use of data to tailor programs to meet the needs of the clients they serve; provider agencies need to be involved in the child and family team process and in case conferences; state appropriations for child services need to be sufficient to pay providers on a timely basis and enable providers to develop new programs to meet emerging needs; minority-led agencies need to be supported and their use encouraged; additional funding should be targeted for cultural competency training for staff; scholarships should be available to attract minority students to clinical and licensed professions; and Indiana needs to be part of the national conversation regarding the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act.
Brant L. Ping, Child and Adolescent Placement Project
The CAP program was created in1994 in response to the rising cost of residential placement. CAP acts as a catalyst for collaboration among providers with a focus on placing kids in their own communities so that family ties can be maintained. Accessibility of data is a challenge, both through QUEST and ICWIS, not to mention the fact that these two systems do not talk to each other. With the change in funding and the growth of DCS there may a shift in priorities in the coming year. I think 2009 will be a difficult year. Providers will be too worried about getting paid to think about disproportionality in their systems and DCS will be slower to respond. CAP issues a number of RFPs and always includes cultural competency in the requirements, but the residential master contract does not include that requirement. In terms of strengths, the length of stay in residential programs has been reduced although we still have disproportionality with an average of 50% minority children in placement.
Dr. Alton Strange, Lutheran Child and Family Services
Approximately 70% of the youth served by our agency are youth of color. Most of the youth we serve are discharged to transitional living or foster care; only about 10-15% are reunified with their families. One barrier to reunification is that residential programs focus on kids and the families are peripheral; we offer therapy services and have started holding family days but we need to do more to build bridges on both sides. Because our sole focus is the child, it is not really our duty to follow up with the family. As a residential facility we cannot mandate family participation. Another barrier is that many of the kids come from problem neighborhoods and if the neighborhood doesn’t change, should we send the youth back to it? We also have barriers of getting accurate diagnoses of youth; children of color tend to have many placements and getting accurate information from those providers is a barrier. One project that has shown some success is the Dawn project where children attend our school and at the end of the day we call the parent, tell the parent how the child has done in school that day and ask if the parent wants to take the child home.
Kathy Myers asked whether panelists see a problem with the disproportionate number of African American youth aging out of foster care services without sufficient services to help them transition to adulthood. Cathy Graham responded that there has been emphasis on those issues in the legislature and positive steps have been taken such as extending Medicaid for those youth and the 21st Century Scholarship program. John Brandon added that older foster youth are at a difficult age; many are sick of the system and don’t want to be told how to live. Geneva Osawe shared that she had been a CASA for a child who spent 18 months in a residential facility and did not progress beyond Level I. Ms. Osawe reviewed the child’s records and saw that this child had had five therapists in the facility in less than a year. Don’t residential providers think creatively about how to get kids out of the facility? Mr. Brandon responded that most lengths of stay are 6-9 months.
Presentation: Permanency Panel
Ron Carpenter, Childrens Bureau
The biggest problem we see is that we bounce kids around from home to home. With regard to disproportionality I think a lot has to do with proper assessment on the part of DCS and the hiring of additional caseworkers will help with that. Another issue is staffing; at the Children’s Bureau all new employees get two days of cultural competency training and eight hours annually thereafter. Our staff is 55% African American and 5% Latino, and our Board of Directors has a balanced race and gender representation. At one point we had a strong “Homes for Black Children” program. Currently we have the “Parents as Teachers” program, a short term respite housing program with 70% African American participation, and a summer youth employment program with 90% African American participation. Our NACS program is an emerging best practice model. We also have Project Safe Place which provides kids having problems with a safe place to go and a teen parenting program which encourages young mothers to stay in school. The key theme in reducing disproportionality is removing barriers and linking existing resources.
Alfreda Singleton-Smith, The Villages Family Connections Network
The Family Connections Network program was founded in 2002 and provides support as well as information and referral services to families providing kinship care. Currently we serve over 60 families and 125 children in Marion County. We have embraced the Child Welfare League of America definition of kinship care which is a broad inclusive definition. This is important because in Indiana the Villages has the only program that serves both formal and informal kinship homes including aunts, uncles, fictive kin, etc. Research shows that children in kinship care are just as safe, less likely to have multiple placements, less likely to change schools and more likely to maintain connections with siblings and extended family. Kinship care frees up foster families for children who do not have kinship resources, and keeps children from entering the system. The challenges are in the numbers: in Indiana more than 80,000 or 5.2% of children live with grandparents. Another 1.2% of Indiana’s children live in households headed by other relatives. My recommendations are to move forward with the Kinship Care Navigator pilot project that was instituted in 2007 to help families navigate systems such as public assistance and subsidized guardianship, to implement the subsidized guardianship program and require providers to modify services to provide support to kinship providers. 80% of our clients are African American, 20% are Caucasian or Latino and 90% of them are elderly.
Michelle Clarke, IUPUI Educational Success Program
We work with foster youth ages 14-24 to help them reach their educational goals. Statistics show that less than 50% of foster children graduate from high school, less than 25% go on to college and of these, less than 3% acquire a Bachelors degree. One strength of our program is that it works with middle school, high school and college age youth. Barriers include lack of funding for tutoring services, lack of sufficient financial aid for foster children who aspire to higher education, bureaucratic barriers to receiving that aid and lack of school and agency participation and collaboration. My recommendations include legislative action around providing tuition waivers to foster youth and additional support for tutoring.
Pastor R.E. Willoughby, Concerned Clergy
I am a survivor of foster care. I was one of the “good” foster care children who wanted to do well in school and go to college and I graduated early from high school, after which I became homeless. In order to survive I joined the Navy. Concerned Clergy try to do what we can for youth when they come out of foster care: job readiness, job placement, financial help, food, tutoring, fatherhood programs etc. Everything we do depends on funding. We just had a camp for kids that could have served 80 kids but we could only take 40 although the fee was $30 for ten weeks. We are good at what we do and we are right there in the neighborhoods but we do need to have better partnerships with the agency providers. Even today when kids are released from foster care they do not know their rights and what is available to them. Someone needs to address this problem; when kids go out into the community there needs to be some kind of program or services for them. A lot of them would go to school or college if they knew it was available to them.
Rev. David Greene, Sr., 2nd Baptist Church
Like Pastor Willoughby the Second Baptist Church has programs for the family. We focus a lot on the parenting piece and have a special program for blended families. We focus on working with men to help them be better fathers which includes helping with self-esteem issues of men who want to be good parents but don’t know how. We provide a support structure for single young mothers who are struggling. For youth we have character building programs that address gang prevention. Many of our youth have been victimized by molestation, being moved from home to home and feeling like nobody cares so we have a huge emphasis on reaching those youth. We emphasize education through tutoring and holding kids accountable for their grades, passing ISTEP. We have a mentoring program called Leadership Development because we believe that every young person can be a leader.
Rev. Bruce Farr, Overcoming Church
I am the pastor of Overcoming Church and the president of the Martindale-Brightwood Community Resurrection Partnership which is a collaboration of all the churches in the community. We partner with area businesses and organizations to address issues such as crime and environmental issues that affect the community. Overcoming Church has a social ministry called Project Safety Net which serves pregnant teenagers and provides a nurturing home for them. We also partner with social agencies that will provide pre-natal care. The church supports these programs but we need funding to be able to expand them. We have found that many of our young men and women have a lot of anger and when they get into the system they also go through grief and loss. We try to help them with the grief and loss so that it does not turn inward and become anger.
Dr. Green thanked the panelists for their work and briefly summarized the major themes that had emerged:
Ø Going to where the children are
Ø Working with children in more culturally responsive ways
Ø Need for more resources
Ø Making data more useable
Ø Awareness of the “new poor”
Ø Understanding trauma from a historical perspective
Ø Being aware of protective factors as well as risk factors
Ø Re-unification vs. Termination of Parental Rights
Ø Supporting youth as they age out of the system
Ø Supporting grandparents who are providing kinship care
Ø Importance of collaboration and barriers to collaboration
Ø Organizational issues such as resources and staffing
Ø Role of the church
Ø Need for legislative support
Dr. Green concluded the morning session. The group broke for lunch and afterward came back into small groups to develop recommendations for the Commission.
Dr. Green reviewed those recommendations at the close of the meeting. Her summary is attached to this document.
The meeting was adjourned at 3:00 PM.
Respectfully submitted,
Margie Lee-Szymanski
Sequoia Consulting Group
CHILD WELFARE STAKEHOLDERS MEETING REPORT
Grace Missionary Baptist Church
Thursday, July 24th, 2008
Nearly 40 participants who work in agencies providing prevention, placement, permanency and preservation programs participated in a dialogue and resource sharing session regarding disproportionality in child welfare. The following themes surfaced as points for consideration during the stakeholders meeting.
Services Offered
Where offered
Home Based
Office
Outreach (Community)
Cultural Competency Training Needs
Pre-training- in higher education (Criminal Justice, Social Work)
Provide various levels for (1) new staff, (2) regular staff
Provide ongoing training
Resources Needed
Funding
Legislation
Recruitment Issues
Kinship options
Provide creative alternatives
Provide support for families
Quality of Care Concerns
Reduced length of time in placement
Referrals
How decisions are made
Process, Strengths & Challenges
Collaboration Needs
Sharing Data
Existing Models
Church, Community Organizations
Faith Based
Minority Organizations (Support)
Questions:
Are we intervening too late?
Are we involved too long?
Is our focus reunification or termination?
Following the review of areas that surfaced, participants selected four areas to focus on in small groups. Areas selected included (1) Decreased length of time in placement, (2) Collaborations, (3) Reunification vs. Termination, (4) The Referral Process. The involvement and support of more minority agencies was also discussed.
GROUP RECOMMENDATIONS
1. Decreased length of time in placement (Alton Strange, Dave Rozzell, Pastor Willoughby, Michelle Clark, Angela Green)
- Redefine kinship to use the Child Welfare League of America definition:
“Kinship care is the full time care, nurturing and protection of children by relatives, members of their tribes or clans, godparents, stepparents, or any adult who has a kinship bond with a child. This definition is designed to be inclusive and respectful of cultural values and ties of affection. It allows a child to grow to adulthood in a family environment.”
- Child Welfare League of America, (2005) Fact Sheet: Kinship Care
- Encourage church families to adopt.
- Institute fines, community service to engage parents who are in violation (contempt of court). Ensure that parents have received Advisement of Rights.
- Implement concurrent planning strategies.
2. Collaborations (Ron Carpenter, Gregg Ellis, Geneva Osawe, Elder Lionel Rush, Shirlean Seawood)
- Utilize Family -Child Caregiver System as a model/springboard.
- Make collaboration mandatory beyond new DCS teaming model.
- Implement Family Case conferences that are family driven.
- Case managers should intervene and involve teachers, minister, multiple placements, fathers
- Engage small organizations, newer organizations, increase opportunities for bidding
- Driving depth for notice of new contracting opportunities (website driven)
- Develop 1-3 mentors (DCS) to build capacity- beyond licensing (1 for each of the three regions (northern, central and southern Indiana- regarding proposals, and after the contract with minority led, non-traditional outreach and contracting agencies.
- Engage all systems – including faith based in parent engagement and youth development
- Provide special flex funding (innovative for new ideas) – Regional Services Council evaluates proposals
- Stringent guidelines or cookie cutter approach may eliminate less sophisticated but highly needed organizations.
- Reunification vs. Termination (Judge Bonaventura, Roderick Wheeler, Jennifer Darby, Dr. Lorraine Blackman, Bruce Farr)
- Help families navigate system
- Offer co-located services
- Be aware of effects of institutional racism, socio- economic status, cultural competency issues in the process (i.e. 2 children- 1 bed)
- Provide Cultural Competency training (Annie E. Casey curriculum)
- Petition for termination of parental rights only if a plan for adoption is in place
- Goal- termination with adoption
- Adoption subsidies should be decided by court or independent rather than DCS (Judicial review right)
- Work with churches, provide parenting training and outreach, develop formal relationships
- Adopt a Safety + Model- at all cost- keep youth safe- to contribute to family functioning and well being
4. Referral Process (? - no worksheet provide)
- DCS ensures that quality services are available
- Diversity – match needs of families with services
- Referring agency may hold grudge- and blacklist organizations
- When there is a change – insiders lose rapport
- Make opportunity to evaluate a 2 way process (DCS → Service Providers Service Providers → DCS)
- Support family case managers who have numerous pressures, risks, and are held personally responsible
- Communicate with extended family and natural helpers, increase outreach
- An attitudinal change is needed. Change from punitive to opportunity. Respond differently when parents seek help- currently punitive response exists when parent asks for assistance.
- Appropriate expertise, data base
- Timely referrals, early intervention, involve families and significant others
Other
Mentoring Minority and New Agencies
- Use certification listing for non-profits in developing collaboratives (United Way Model of Accreditation)
- Use standard criteria, fairness
- Communication, language & digital divide (where does it fit?)
- Increase transparency re: why proposals are not accepted
- May be using evidenced based, etc…may be unaware of training, increase competitiveness, provide terminology for success
Evaluation
Participants concluded with an evaluation of the day which included Wishes (what went well) and hopes (what they would like to have happen)
Successes
- Discussions
- Reconnecting
- Black church involvement at the table
- Panel Discussion format
Hopes
- More DCS representation (DCS could benefit from hearing discussion)
- More educational representation – no teachers
- Latino families needed
- Include State representatives
- Include Board leaders
- More minority provider involvement
Consultant/Researcher Observations & Next Steps:
The Child Welfare Stakeholders meeting served to reinforce the direction identified by the Commission. Areas surfaced regarding reduction of time in placement, need for collaboratives, focus on reunification, data consistency and timeliness, use of best practice models, needed legislative and other resources, and cultural competency. While these areas have been identified by the sub-committees, strategies for addressing some of these topics were enriched by the discussion and work groups. Next steps include: (1) development of a Child Welfare Stakeholder listing, (2) sharing stakeholder recommendations with the Commission, (3) incorporating input into accumulated data gathered, (4) sharing child welfare recommendations with the stakeholders and (5) incorporating input from the stakeholder review of the child welfare recommendations.
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