acfbanner
 
 
 
 
Skip Navigation
Skip Navigation
 
Skip Navigation
 
 
Community Partnerships for Protecting Children
 

Experience has confirmed that children's well-being and safety are most successful when child welfare agencies find meaningful ways to partner with communities to support families. Child service and technical assistance providers can use this overview to learn some of the ways agencies may turn their vision for community partnerships into practice. These promising practices are taken from a series of articles from the Center for Community Partnerships in Child Welfare (CCPCW).

The following publication is provided courtesy of the Center for Community Partnerships in Child Welfare and the Center for the Study of Social Policy.

To read PDF files, get Get Adobe Reader here.
Community Partnerships for Protecting Children
 

Promising Practices: Establishing Community Partnerships for Child Welfare

The movement toward partnerships between child welfare agencies and communities is based on the consensus that safety, permanency, and well-being for children are more successful when children and families are supported within their communities. Putting this concept into practice means that child welfare agencies must determine meaningful ways to partner with communities so that the responsibility for supporting families is broadly shared. Moving this vision from theory to practice is the focus of a recent series of articles from the Center for Community Partnerships in Child Welfare (CCPCW). The articles include the following:

  • "Establishing a Positive Community Presence for Public Child Welfare Agencies" describes strategies that agencies can use to facilitate partnerships with neighborhoods, such as outbasing workers or co-locating staff within other community agencies. An example is provided from Louisville, KY, in which staff from various agencies are housed together within the community.
  • "The Community Partnership Practice Model" describes an approach to preventing and addressing child maltreatment that involves the community and local agencies. This outcome-driven approach focuses on building a team to support the family, using comprehensive family assessments to identify strengths and challenges, individualizing services, and tracking results.
  • "Human Resource Management's Role in Recruiting, Hiring, and Retaining a Workforce Committed to a New Practice Model" argues that building community partnerships requires child welfare agencies to rethink the ways in which they recruit and train staff. Different competencies may be required for staff who work in community settings, as well as different management and appraisal models.
  • "The Pay-Off of Comprehensive Training" notes that both staff and community partners may require training. For instance, community partners may require training in such areas as advocacy, decision-making, and governance.

The full text of these articles can be found in the Spring 2005 issue of CCPCW's Safekeeping. [PDF, 390KB]

Go to top


Community Partnerships for Protecting Children. Center for Community Partnerships in Child Welfare and Center for the Study of Social Policy. 2005. English.