Child Welfare Strategy Group

CWSG helps child welfare agencies, practitioners and policymakers do better by children and families who experience foster care. Our team of consultants:

• Provides intensive consulting, coaching and technical assistance so agencies are more effective in helping children heal and recover from maltreatment.
  
• Publishes a desk guide describing 10 promising practices used by high-performing child welfare agencies, along with research and tools for implementing these practices.
  
• Develops tools that agencies can use to collect quality data, as well as evaluate and update services and policies.
  
• Finds innovative approaches to helping children and families.

Learn how three child welfare agencies use Team Decision Making to 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.

Connecticut placed more children with family members and decreased the number of children in unnecessary group placements.

An improved service array can reduce child removals, as Hampton, Virginia, has proven.

Virginia cut 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 to Indiana’s child welfare transformation.

Learning to engage family members helped improve outcomes for Maine’s children.

Four states use a Casey-developed approach to reduce group placements and spark larger system transformations.

View all CWSG Case Studies

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 Agency describes 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 one describes 10 practices and outcomes for measuring where an agency stands compared to others in the field.

Part two links 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 and how to measure racial and other disparities.

Frontline practice improvements and family teaming solutions. We help agencies work more effectively with children and families, keep teens from entering care because of conflict with their parents and make sure that teens leaving foster care have family support.

Assessing child well-being. Are children’s needs being met by child welfare agencies and providers? We are testing a new tool to 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 requirements so more relatives can care for children when their parents cannot.

Foster family recruitment and support. We help agencies implement child-specific and targeted recruitment strategies, strengthen foster family training and support and encourage 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 and qualitative 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.