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Community Partnerships for Protecting Children
Foster Adoptive Support and Training
Family Centered Practice
This practice represents a family-centered service delivery that stresses partnership among families and their support systems, both formal and informal. The foundation of the practice is the use of Family Team Meetings for prevention and the systematic use of Family Team Meetings by community partners for school, health and other related issues. Daily working relationships are strengthened with mental health, domestic violence and substance providers, critical factors in preventing abuse.
Building Neighborhood Networks of Support for Families
Sites enlist key players from other service systems to ensure that families get the help they need. These partner systems include neighbors, churches, law enforcement, health care providers, domestic violence services, substance abuse treatment, mental health services, emergency economic assistance, and many others. In addition, sites direct intensive support to high-risk families to prevent child abuse and neglect
CPS Policy, Practice and Culture Change
CPS works closely in communities changing the community perception from “baby snatchers” to “family helpers”. Sites have made several important changes in their CPS systems: They collect and analyze CPS administrative data to determine the trends in the neighborhoods they are serving and use this data to drive their decision-making to help families.
Shared Decision Making
Each site creates a decision-making body (Steering Committee) composed of a mixture of "professionals" and community residents, working together to make the best choices about preventing child abuse and neglect. They use evaluation information to inform decisions about strategies, funding, staffing, etc.
A Community Partnership is structured in a way in which community partners, DCBS, parents, residents and anyone who would be involved with families in a community, come together regularly to discuss the children of the community, to hear statistics on child abuse and neglect and to combat the issues which promote child abuse and neglect. This structured decision-making body works through a process of strategic planning facilitated by CPPC Consultants, where they will assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and then provide recommendations for funding and services allocating the grant funds to address child abuse and neglect prevention.
