Category: Targeting Resources

The Center for State Child Welfare Data delivers foster home reporting infrastructure states can use—quickly, reliably, and at scale. Building on decades of experience, the Center for State Child Welfare Data at Chapin Hall has engineered a data capture and reporting infrastructure for foster home capacity that enables states to come into federal compliance quickly. The results free agency leaders to focus their time on managing the foster care system rather than managing reporting requirements. Designed to align with U.S. Department of Health and Human Services expectations, the Center’s standardized point-in-time framework produces monthly counts of active foster homes, licensed bed capacity, homes with children placed, unoccupied homes, and average children per home. The reporting also clearly identifies children placed in kinship settings and those placed in group homes or residential care—metrics that are increasingly central to federal oversight, Family First implementation, and state accountability. What distinguishes this work is… Read more >

Learn how the Major Outcomes Report can support states and counties to identify opportunities for improvement and fuel the CQI process.... Read more >

Guest Blogger Susan Dreyfus, President and CEO of the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities, reflects on the importance of the finding that the more agencies rely on research evidence the better outcomes they achieve for children in care.... Read more >

Since 2009, the Data Center the Northern California Training Academy have been working together to provide training opportunities to child welfare practitioners. We virtually sat down with the Academy’s director, Susan Brooks, to learn more about how this work has boosted skills and improved practice in the region. ... Read more >

All states aim to expedite adoption for children who cannot return home safely, but adoption policies vary considerably from state to state. In this new research brief, we examine whether certain types of state adoption policy are associated with faster rates of adoption.... Read more >

Learn more about the Data Center's Hot Spot tool and how risk-adjustment can help your state target its Continuous Quality Improvement efforts.... Read more >

This new research brief illustrates how reliance on group care placement differs throughout the country and how indiviudal and county characteristics interact to influence a child's likelihood of being placed in a group setting.... Read more >

In this new research brief we describe how the Data Center used advanced analytics to level the playing field and examine how permanency outcomes differ inside Wisconsin's private foster care provider network.... Read more >

In 2013, the Data Center collaborated on a project examining patterns of healthcare needs and Medicaid expenditures for children in foster care in New York State. Read more about the findings and their implications for the state's transition from a fee-for-service health care system to managed care. ... Read more >

Today, public child welfare agencies are taking stock of their capacity for Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) and considering the investments they will make in order to build that capacity. How these CQI systems develop will vary from agency to agency depending on administrative structure, staffing patterns, available resources, and a host of other factors. They will all, however, be responsible for facilitating the same basic CQI process—a cycle of problem solving activities that requires the deliberate use of evidence. Given that shared responsibility, the child welfare field will benefit from a common vocabulary for describing what CQI is, the core principles on which CQI rests, and the critical role that evidence plays throughout the CQI process. In keeping with a century-long tradition of CQI that has guided improvement efforts in other fields, we put forth a common language for child welfare CQI in a new publication, Principles, Language, and Shared… Read more >