Conditions for Change in Child Welfare: How Collective Impact Frameworks Inform Family First Implementations

Overview: Evidence-based prevention services for families are critical to avoid family trauma associated with out-of-home removals. The complexity of coordinating cross-system services requires moving prevention-based change efforts away from "isolated impact" toward "collective impact." This panel will draw upon experiences of a public-private-university partnership established to implement a statewide FFPSA program.Proposal text: An array of prevention-focused, trauma-informed, and evidenced-based services delivered to families at the right time is indeed critical to ensure children and families avoid unnecessary traumas experienced by entering foster care. The scale and complexity of coordinating necessary cross-system services, however, has hindered progress in major change efforts for child welfare. Faced with this complexity, funders are often forced to choose which community-based programs and grantees have the maximum potential for isolated impact. But tackling systemic issues like prevention requires a shared approach, learning from and leveraging community partners, common measurement and shared indicators, and backbone support. Fortunately, federal investments in prevention services through the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) have opportunity to bolster these long-needed reforms in child welfare, moving prevention-based change efforts away from an "isolated impact" model and toward a "collective impact" model. This roundtable will draw upon the experiences of the public-private-university partnerships established to drive the initiation and implementation of a statewide FFPSA program.

The roundtable will present the Collective Impact Framework as a model approach for planning and implementing Family First initiatives. Presenters will map key insights and experiences of an early adopter FFPSA implementation to the five major conditions of the Collective Impact Framework, including: 1) setting a common agenda, 2) shared measurement systems, 3) mutually reinforcing activities, 4) continuous communication, and 5) backbone support organizations. Given the importance of the evaluation team's role in facilitating these conditions, the roundtable dialogue will focus particularly on the unique strengths and capacities university partners bring to FFPSA implementations.

The first presenter will address the first condition, related to challenges, successes, and pitfalls of setting a common agenda. The presenter will demonstrate how key implementation science components can serve as drivers for supporting this condition. The next presenter will emphasize the importance of common indicators and shared measurement systems for collective impact in FFPSA implementations. Specifically, this part of the discussion will show how university partners assessed readiness and technical capacity of grantees to collect common data elements and how they enhanced existing web-based technologies to enable all grantees regardless of their capacity to leverage common systems for collecting data, reporting on outcomes, and monitoring continuous quality improvement. For discussion of the third condition, mutually reinforcing activities, a third presenter will share how a former inhibitor of social change (i.e., service providers delivering interventions within their own powers) can actually be harnessed for collective action. In this case, the FFPSA program creates space for each partner to play a specific role and provide critical services and interventions necessary for children and families to thrive and avoid involvement with the child welfare system (e.g., mental health, parent skill-building, support, substance use services, kinship navigation). The last presenter will conclude with insight on sustaining the FFPSA program's collective efforts by investing in the final two conditions of the Collective Impact Framework, continuous communication and backbone support. This discussion will include practical tips for establishing group norms and expectations and facilitating ongoing partner engagement.