Lasting Benefits for Children and Families
The Collaborative Pathways framework serves as a model that can easily be used by anyone who works with children and families. This framework serves as a valuable guide for people seeking to implement equitable prevention child welfare practices, fostering a more supportive environment.
You will understand the impact of trust building, co-design, community level data, race equity, and predicting prevention. These solutions help catalyze the transformation of the child welfare system.
You play an important role in helping reshape child welfare into a child and family well being system, one that support families and keep families together.
Trust Building
Your number one goal is to foster collaboration by bringing together biological parents with lived experience and foster parents with leaders from child-serving systems and community leaders.
The aim is to facilitate a shared discussion and exchange of perspectives at a common table, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding of the challenges and opportunities within the child-serving landscape.
This collaborative approach seeks to bridge the gap between different stakeholders, promoting inclusivity, and leveraging the valuable insights of those directly involved with child-serving systems.
Important Tips
- Focus on how the message is presented to the team
- Agree on common definitions and purpose
- Get everyone on the same page “Vision & Mission”
- Remind the purpose of the project
- Understand how this group works together
- Discuss potential barriers
- Compensate lived experience experts
1.
Co-Design
Co-design plays a pivotal role in facilitating a collaborative and impactful approach when bringing together biological parents, foster parents, child-serving leaders, and community leaders. By engaging all stakeholders in the design process, co-design ensures that diverse perspectives, experiences, and needs are actively considered.
This inclusive method allows participants to collectively shape solutions, policies, or interventions that address the complex challenges within child-serving systems.
The collaborative nature of co-design fosters a sense of power sharing and ownership that empowers stakeholders to contribute their expertise, ultimately leading to more effective and equitable outcomes.
It promotes a shared responsibility in creating solutions that resonate with the unique experiences of all involved parties, fostering a more responsive child-serving environment.
2.
Using Community Data to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect
Encourage and enhance data sharing among organizations dedicated to serving children, youth, and families, such as the courts, child welfare services, law enforcement, mental health and substance use disorder services, and other systems among others. To more effectively identify and assist families in need of support proactively, well before a crisis arises.
It’s crucial to approach data-sharing initiatives with a thoughtful understanding of confidentiality concerns, common data elements, and the integration of different information systems, taking into account various factors that contribute to a comprehensive and empathetic approach to support families
3.
Review data with racial equity lens.
By employing a racial equity lens, we acknowledge that not all families experience child welfare interventions in the same way. It allows us to recognize historical and structural factors that contribute to racial inequities, such as biases within the system.
Using a race equity lens when examining data is crucial because it helps us understand and address systemic disparities and patterns that may exist in the treatment of families.
Researchers can look at the correlation between poverty rates, demographic data, and reports of child abuse in neighborhoods to understand where additional resources may be needed.
This approach promotes fairness, justice, and a more inclusive understanding of the challenges faced by families, ultimately working towards a child welfare system that serves all families equitably.
4.
Predict Align Prevent
Predict Align Prevent attempts to use data mapping to predict where future child maltreatment will occur before it occurs and to determine which protective factors will be most helpful in preventing it in each unique community.
Predict Align Prevent undertakes a 3 step process in partnership with existing community leaders, stakeholders, community members, and coalitions:
5.
Predict: Machine learning (a form of artificial intelligence “AI”) predicts where child maltreatment is likely to occur in the future by identifying the places where children have historically been at greatest risk of maltreatment in the community and how that correlates to other risk factors. It does this geographically, without profiling individuals.
Align: Communities identify where prevention services and other critical supports are offered and how those locations match up with the highest risk areas for maltreatment. This data supports community partners in developing and executing a data-driven strategic plan for prevention.
Prevent: Over time, the effectiveness of prevention efforts is evaluated using objective, population-level measures of child health and safety. This quality improvement cycle is intended to uncover, strengthen, and replicate effective prevention initiatives.
