Supporting Equity Through Child Welfare Community Collaborations

The goal of the CWCC initiative is to fund collaborative projects that address local barriers and provide a continuum of supports to promote child and family well-being and strengthen protective factors, ultimately leading to fewer new referrals to child welfare and more families staying together. While each CWCC project shared this goal, they proposed a diverse range of strategies to achieve their desired outcomes. 

This brief describes the specific strategies that CWCC projects used to identify and address equity needs in their community, as well as areas where growth is needed to achieve more equitable systems and outcomes. This brief is one of many from the cross-site process evaluation designed to advance the evidence around collaborative approaches to preventing child abuse and neglect.

ACF’s CWCC initiative funded 13 collaborative efforts across the United States to prevent child maltreatment and reduce community-level rates of child abuse, neglect, and out-of-home placements. CWCC projects used several key strategies to promote equity including:

• Engaging community members and individuals with lived experience (particularly those with child welfare experience) in program design and implementation to help ensure services meet the needs of the community.  
• Promoting more equitable access to services by offering services in a variety of formats (both in-person and virtually) that are convenient and accessible to families, reducing language barriers by translating resources into multiple languages, and coordinating services across systems to reduce the agency-level silos that can make systems difficult for families to navigate.
• Embedding equity as a guiding principle in the work by, for example, dedicating organizational time and resources to providing diversity, equity, and inclusion training to staff. 
• Working to rebuild trust with community members and individuals who have historically been overrepresented in and disenfranchised by the child welfare system.
• Using data to identify community needs and geographic areas with scarce resources, better understand the impacts of systemic racism, and identify what strategies might fit the needs of their communities.

Grantees and their partners identified the following as areas where growth is needed to achieve more equitable systems and outcomes:

• More specialized services for specific groups in their communities (e.g., LGBTQIA2S+ individuals, American Indian/Alaska Natives, immigrants, etc.) to address unmet needs; 
• Greater authentic engagement with individuals with lived experience, building upon initial engagement efforts by continuously involving individuals with lived experience throughout each phase of the project and valuing them as equal partners (e.g., compensating them for their time); 
• Continuous self-education about and commitment to equity (on the part of both individuals and organizations and both grantees and partners); and
• Strategies to overcome bureaucratic and legislative barriers.
   

This brief uses qualitative data collected from (1) annual site visits with in-depth interviews with CWCC project leadership, key partners and staff, as well as (2) information from grantee documents such as original grant applications and applications for supplemental equity funding. These data sources describe the strategies that CWCC grantees used to promote equity and identify areas for growth.

Naylon, K., Cook, R., Schachtner, R., Malm, K., Flannigan, A., & Blocklin, M. (2024). Supporting Equity Through Child Welfare Community Collaborations. OPRE Report 2024-102, Washington, DC: Office of Research, Planning, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, US Department of Health and Human Services.

Tano, C., Layzer, C., Hyra, A., Cook, R., and Blocklin, M. (2021). Community Prevention of Child Maltreatment: Lessons learned and Promising Practices During the COVID-19 Pandemic. OPRE Report 2023-11, Washington, DC: Office of Research, Planning, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Cook, R., Schachtner, R., & Blocklin, M. (2023). An Introduction to the Child Welfare Community Collaborations Grantees and Strategies. OPRE Report # 2023-332, Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

Layzer, C., Blocklin, M., Schachtner, R., & Cook, R. (2023). Child Welfare Community Collaborations Cross-Site Process Evaluation Design and Methods. OPRE Report # 2023-334, Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Cook, R., Cusick, J., & Schachtner, R., & Blocklin, M. (2023). Child Welfare Community Collaborations Projects at a Glance. OPRE Report # 2023-333, Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

McKlindon, A., Schachtner, R., Flannigan, A. (2024). Approaches to Partnership in the Child Welfare Community Collaborations Initiative. OPRE Report 2024-103, Washington, DC: Office of Research, Planning, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, US Department of Health and Human Services.