family preservation

To really help families with child welfare experience, we must build trust, listen without agenda and commit to making family-driven changes.

By Jeremy Loudenback

By Kathleen Creamer and Chris Gottlieb A new memorandum from the federal government’s top child welfare leaders argues that the field has been getting one of its most important goals — permanency — all wrong.

By Vivek Sankaran Poet David Whyte writes, “Start close in, don’t take the second step or the third, start with the first thing close in, the step you don’t want to take.”

Lost in the shuffle of the obvious and only news story going, the federal Prevention Services Clearinghouse has approved Homebuilders, a family preservation model with a large track record of success, for new federal funding under the Family First Prevention Services Act. 

The coronavirus has dominated headlines across the country as the federal government and state leaders scramble to pull together broad plans of attack for testing, quarantining and treating those with severe symptoms.

The nearly 2,000-page spending bill released yesterday, which is expected to be approved by both chambers of Congress, will include legislation that seeks to incentivize and ease the path for states on implementation of the Family First Prevention Services Act.

As we covered on Monday, you can add Motivational Interviewing (MI) as the tenth model of intervention approved by a clearinghouse for use under the Family First Prevention Services Act. It was hardly a surprise, since it’s received top ratings from other clearinghouses on child welfare services.

In late September, Youth Services Insider reported on a draft bill floating around that would offer cash and some easing on restrictions to help states more quickly implement the Family First Prevention Services Act, a major overhaul of federal child welfare funding that passed in 2018 and mostly took effect last month.