On Tuesday, May 2, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hosted an “Improving Access to Federal Grants for Underserved Communities” hearing. There is a growing interest at the federal level in reforming the federal grants space to make it more transparent, efficient, and accessible, particularly for entities that don’t have the resources or capacity to apply but need access the most. Social Current CEO Jody Levison-Johnson and Senior Director of Government Affairs Blair Abelle-Kiser submitted written testimony detailing the challenges and opportunities in the federal grants space. We will continue to gain insights from our network and build upon the increasing attention to this topic from our federal elected officials.

Key Hearing Takeaways

Committee Chairman Gay Peters (D-Mich.) opened the hearing by emphasizing the enormous impact of federal grants. Specifically, over $1 trillion in federal grant money was awarded last year to 131,000 recipient organizations by over 50 different federal agencies. There are over 1,900 grant programs with their own application procedures, portals and technical assistance capabilities, and award processes. He acknowledged that the current system is plagued by complex language, demanding applications, and technical challenges – all of which deter many organizations from applying in the first place. Chairman Peters stated that the purpose of the hearing was to address these barriers and present opportunities to reform the grants system to allow enhanced accessibility.

The first witness, Jeff Arkin, director of strategic issues with the Government Accountability Office, outlined the main challenges in the grant-making process. He said that grant recipients’ human capital, organizational and financial capacity is sometimes limited. He proposed that federal technical assistance at the front end and administrative and oversight assistance during grant implementation could be the answer. He also said that streamlining and creating more transparency in the grant process would reduce redundancies, enable data-driven decision-making, and ensure accountability.

Meagan Elliott, deputy chief financial officer of the City of Detroit, spoke about her office’s comprehensive strategy towards bringing more efficiency and transparency to the grant application process. The city combined all grant staff into one entity, which worked closely with federal, state, and local funders, including charitable and corporate partners. These changes led to an increased success rate for grant applications and more efficient communications through a centralized office. Drawing from her experience, Elliot recommended that federal grants enhance flexibility, allowing local leaders to decide how best to allocate funds based on the community’s pressing needs. She cited the American Rescue Plan Act State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds as a model for this. She also stressed the need for clarity around grant expectations and consistency across federal portals.

Matthew Hanson, associate managing director at Witt O’Brien’s LLC, detailed his experience assisting federal, tribal, state, local, and community-based organizations to access government grants for the past 30 years. In his experience, the federal government has expanded technical and training assistance for grantees, but not uniformly. Moreover, little effort has been invested in helping new entities apply for grants, especially those with limited resources. Hanson recommended, among other things, mandates for technical assistance, more grant management capacity, and the creation of a grant Helpdesk for pre- and post-award support.

The witness statements were followed by an enlightening question period from senators on the committee. In response to a question from Senator James Lankford (R-Ok.) about the ease of search terms on the grants.gov portal, Mr. Arkin said that recommendations had been made to the Office of Budget and Management concerning the simplification of search parameters within the portal. Senator Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) noted that her state continues to underperform in federal dollars per capita. Mr. Arkin testified that the GREAT Act passed in 2019 helped standardize grant language and ease prepopulated information, which should help increase the number of grant applications. However, he also urged that lack of awareness about grants is a continuing issue.

Senator John Ossoff (D-Ga.) discussed the challenges facing rural and Black communities in his state regarding accessing federal grants. Mr. Arkin responded that the new Rural Partners Network, a group of federal agencies and states, was created to overcome barriers to grants and opportunities in rural communities and that some aspects of the American Rescue plan have emphasized racial equity and should be explored in the context of grant awards.

The Child Welfare League of America publishes a bimonthly issue of Children’s Voice, a magazine that features a wide array of topics that encourage public discussion and debate among those who are committed to helping children and families. In their first issue of 2023, Social Current leaders were among those voices in two different feature articles:

Read both articles and consider purchasing the rest of the Children’s Voice issue to learn from what others are doing in the sector.

By: Jody Levison-Johnson and Amy Templeman

All families need help sometimes, and to deliver that help, we must understand the external conditions that impact their lives. The human and social services sector is at the forefront of an evolutionary change, one that aims to realign social services to be more preventative with greater upstream resources that focus more directly on addressing the social determinants of health (SDoH) to achieve better outcomes.

While we have increased our understanding of the importance of addressing external conditions, including social and economic opportunities, access to community-based resources and supports, greater health equity and more, our nation’s investment in place-based supports has not kept pace.

For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has shed a harsh light on the public health disparities in our nation. Communities of color are more at risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022), demonstrating that ZIP codes are still the top determinant of how we live, work, and play (Ducharme & Wolfson, 2019). The opportunities lie in examining the discriminatory practices that undermine well-being so that systems can better address root causes.

The potential to improve health outcomes and more fully address SDoH through greater investments in human services could transform a range of systems, including health, education, welfare, and criminal justice systems and ultimately result in greater well-being for all families.

To achieve this will require a tremendous shift in resources, both at the federal funding level to redirect funding to more front-end resources, through policies that adapt to a more preventative approach, and in the way that place-based services are delivered by community-based organizations. Too many of our social systems were structured to respond only after harm occurs; by realigning our nation’s social service delivery systems and reimagining the power and impact of the social sector, we can deliver on the promise of equitable access to health and well-being for all people.

Our Nation Under Invests in Social Services

The Commonwealth Fund recently released a report that ranks the United States last in health care systems among 11 of the wealthiest countries in the world, despite having the highest percentage spending of its GDP on health care. The United States spends twice as much on health care as other developed nations and yet, fares the worst in key health metrics, such as life expectancy and maternal and infant mortality. In fact, a recent report from the CDC found that the United States has the highest rate of maternal death of any developed nation (Kekatos, 2022).

How can that be? According to data from the Bassett Healthcare Network and University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, only 20% of health outcomes are attributable to actual health care while 80% are attributable to SDoH, including environmental, behavioral, and socioeconomic factors (Bassett Healthcare Network, n.d.).

It’s telling that our nation’s investment in human services that address SDoH is among the lowest in developed nations (Alliance for Strong Families and Communities, 2018). Researchers have begun to draw a direct linkage between that investment disparity and health outcomes, noting that “states with higher ratios of social to health spending had better health outcomes one and two years later” (Bradley et al., 2016).

The pandemic helped us all understand that no family is immune to stress or challenges. Stress can overload families and contribute to greater risk of adversity. Times of turmoil often pave the way for key societal shifts. Today, we have the opportunity to shift our focus more toward addressing social determinants and realign our systems to better support all families.

Supporting the Shift from Child Welfare Systems to Child and Family Well-being Systems

A blueprint for this can be found in the shift from child welfare systems to child and family well-being systems that offer families the support they need to prevent harm before it occurs. The transformation that we see today is moving away from the idea that it is solely the function of the child protection agency to keep kids safe. Instead, CPS is one component in a shared, community-wide responsibility for child and family well-being with an emphasis on prevention and a public health approach that addresses SDoH.

For our child welfare system to truly move to a preventive approach, upstream resources must be rooted in community and not tied to intervention by a government system to access them. This would require communities working in partnership with funders (often governmental entities) to identify their specific needs and design supports that effectively respond to them.

In fact, in December 2021 researchers from Tufts Medical Center found that incidents of child abuse actually dropped during the pandemic at the start of the lockdown, despite many pundits suggesting that incidents would rise due to children being isolated at home (Sege & Stephens, 2021). Evidence suggests that while the pandemic increased familial stress for many, it also afforded families access to additional financial supports and increased time at home contributing to enhanced parent-child attachment. These factors, the researchers believe, potentially account for this drop in abuse and maltreatment.

We are at a unique moment in history. Our deepening understanding of what it takes to weather the storms of a global pandemic is resulting in a shift in the way we think about supporting families. In fact, we are more primed than ever before to think about economic and family supports and to tackle child welfare in a way that emphasizes supporting families over penalizing them.

And that thinking is supported by an ever-growing body of research. Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago recently released a brief on the impact of concrete economic supports for families and its correlations to reducing involvement with the child welfare system (Wiener et al., 2021). Their research identified poverty as a key driver of child welfare system involvement and suggested that even modest economic supports could help stabilize families and prevent the need for removing children from the home.

Systems Transformation is Complex but Achievable

Reshaping child welfare systems into child and family well-being systems that can address SDoH will require a broad focus on system transformation. With shared values focused on equity, diversity, and inclusion, we must modernize child welfare systems through redesign with parent and youth partners, drive cross-system integration and operations, provide sustainable financing, and remove systemic and structural barriers upholding racist practices and policies that contribute to poor health outcomes.

In 2021, with those goals in mind, key leaders in the social service sector and Social Current convened a group of human service sector leaders to develop guiding policy principles for the social sector’s work through the lens of SDoH. The group identified seven guiding principles that are critical to addressing SDoH across the child welfare sector. They are:

Partnering with the Entire Health Ecosystem

Changing Power Dynamics

People-centered Focus

Addressing Root Causes

Anti-racist Approaches

Forming and Scaling Solutions

Prevention and Early Detection

System transformation is never easy, but these guiding principles can be applied as a roadmap for change and help transform a broad range of social sector systems in a way that is responsive where it needs to be and fair in its treatment and decision-making for children and families. And these lessons are applicable across the entire social and human-serving ecosystem, including child welfare, health care systems, juvenile justice, education, and more.

Jody Levison-Johnson is the President and CEO of Social Current, an organization focused on advancing the work of the social sector through collaboration, innovation, policy, and practice excellence. Jody is a longstanding champion for systems change that helps individuals and communities thrive. Over several decades, her career has crossed a variety of settings including private providers and state and local governments. Jody holds a MSW degree from Syracuse University and a MA and PhD in Leadership and Change from Antioch University.

Amy Templeman, a kinship and adoptive parent, is the director of Within Our Reach and director of practice excellence at Social Current. In these roles, she works to support families and promote equity. Before joining Social Current, Amy served as executive director of the federal Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities, leading the effort to produce a report to the president and Congress. Amy helped to establish the Office of Well Being at the District of Columbia’s child welfare agency. She gained research experience at The Urban Institute and Johns Hopkins University.

References

READ PDF VERSION

This article was originally posted in CWLA’s Children’s Voice Magazine – Vol. 32 #1, 2023. To read through the entirety of Vol, 32, purchase the issue on the Child Welfare READ of America’s website.

By Karen Johnson and Kelly Martin

A mid our day-to-day work to partner with families and children, especially during an ongoing pandemic, it often is challenging to stay apprised of and incorporate the advancing knowledge, research, and evidence around brain science. However, brain science holds great promise in helping us to increase equity, support all families, and strengthen our workforce. The science is clear—adversity and toxic stress can change the brain’s architecture—and preventing and mitigating both are critical in every facet of our work (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2005/2014).

The Texas Change in Mind initiative, convened and led by Social Current, supports 10 community-based organizations that are working to create impact through intersecting levels of change (Social Current, n.d.). Funded by the Episcopal Health Foundation, The Powell Foundation, St. David’s Foundation, and an anonymous donor, the initiative uses a learning collaborative model that allows the organizations to learn from one another, Social Current, and other experts. The Texas organizations are using brain science and equity practices to effect transformative change by promoting the foundations of safe, stable relationships; positive childhood experiences; healthy development; and individual and collective resilience.

This work is guided by the Texas Change in Mind initiative’s theory of change that includes six key areas: Brain science, racial equity, organizational resilience, community impact, communications, and evaluation. Through a wide array of learning engagements over two years, the teams are incorporating new knowledge into their own organizational theories of change and determining their paths forward.

Staff and Organizational Resilience

As the initiative launched in spring 2021, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the participating organizations noted this opportunity could not have come at a better time. They already had been working to embed brain science and equity and were eager for additional support in building capacity and resilience in their workforces.

“So many staff have experienced firsthand inequities regarding COVID-19 in their families and personal lives,” said Nadine Scamp, CEO of Santa Maria Hostel. “We have been thinking about how we can support our staff so they can support our families. Change in Mind is an opportunity to put thought and resources behind this question.”

To equip staff with resilience-building tools, organizations are teaching them brain science concepts, including executive functioning (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2020), and the sequence of engagement: regulate, relate, reason (Perry, 2020). These concrete strategies are being integrated into work with families and helping staff to stay regulated, build psychological safety, and engage in conversations that advance equity practices.

Hand in hand with embedding brain science principles, the Texas organizations are advancing their equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) journeys by administering the Intercultural Development Inventory® (IDI®; see www.idiinventory.com) to key staff. This cross-cultural assessment of intercultural competence is a first step in developing a plan for personal growth. In addition, the organizations’ executive leaders are receiving consultative support from Social Current’s EDI experts on advancing their organizational efforts. This work is stretching teams to, “reach across the organization, be inclusive of staff and team up with cultural proficiency and inclusion folks,” noted Dr. Teri Wood, a Trust Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) clinician and coordinator with the Austin Ed Fund, which supports the Austin Independent School District (AISD).

“Working to grow our EDI skills can be uncomfortable at times and is often hard, but we know you can’t have trauma-informed, brain-based learning/services without EDI. They are interwoven,” said Karen McWhorter, director of development at Family Service Center of Galveston County, who is seeking funding to expand administration of the IDI® across the organization.

Children’s Museum Houston (CMH) has been advancing the work of its Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion (DEAI) Committee, which was started before the pandemic and seeks to make improvements to how it designs and provides programs. The CMH team is adding brain science modules to its new employee onboarding and equity training and regularly engaging with all staff in advancing racial equity.

Texas Change in Mind

“We think of this as a journey—a process. It’s called “Change in Mind” for a reason—it’s really a shift. It makes us put things in perspective,” said Lisa Williams, director of gallery programs at CMH. “Children in this pandemic have suffered in a way that we don’t even know at this point. We are trying to position ourselves to give our families and communities what they need from us.”

Child and Family Well-Being

By focusing on supporting staff, building capacities, and strengthening organizational resilience—all through the lens of brain science and a commitment to equity and justice—the participating organizations are already seeing positive impacts in organization culture shifts and their ability to support children and families.

“We have appreciated the intentionality of bringing the equity, diversity and inclusion conversation into brain science conversations,” said Scamp. “Having the space for staff to wrestle with their perceptions and to support participants in moving beyond stigma and bias regarding their substance use and mental health challenges is foundational change.”

Santa Maria Hostel primarily works with mothers who are experiencing the interwoven challenges of substance use, housing insecurity, and mental health concerns. Santa Maria Hostel’s recent work has focused on supporting healthy relationships between parent participants and their infants and toddlers. They also are building out-of-schooltime programming to focus on school age children.

Originally this looked like a traditional afterschool program. However, given what the team is learning about brain science and intentionally centering families in their children’s development, the program is morphing into a family-based afterschool program with an emphasis on strengthening attachment and serve-and-return communication (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child., n.d.).

The multi-generation approach, a hallmark of brain science-based strategies, is also being used by the Austin Independent School District. As Becky Murillo, LCSW and TBRI clinician, said, “This is going to make our support to schools, students, and families even stronger.” They are working with a group of parents to help them learn about brain development and how they can support their children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development. “Parents understand how it better equips them as caregivers and as parents,” said Murillo. “As they learn, they say, ‘We need to get more parents at this table!’ It feels like an empowerment model to me.”

As the work of the initiative continues, NORC at the University of Chicago (see www.norc.org) is overseeing multiple evaluation objectives, including evaluating the effectiveness of the Change in Mind learning collaborative model in helping sites achieve positive results at individual, organization, and community system levels; building the capacity of sites to use developmental evaluation; and assessing the uptake of racial equity at organizational and community network levels.

We will know more about impact of this work as evaluation results come in. For now, we can attest that the Texas Change in Mind Learning Collaborative is an exciting opportunity to accelerate the application of brain science and equity into systems change efforts in the communities served by the 10 participating organizations. These leaders are being supported to rethink, reflect, and reimagine at all levels of their work—personally, organizationally, and systemically. They’re sharing ideas, supporting each other, and creating a ripple effect in their networks. As Dr. Wood says, “This has brought life, excitement, and hope to our work. Our team is excited for every meeting and asking, ‘What can we do next?”

Karen Johnson, MSW, LCSW leads the development of Social Current’s Change in Mind Institute (see https://www.social-current.
org/engage/change-in-mind-institute/) and the Texas Change in Mind Learning Collaborative.

Kelly Martin, MS, is the Director of Practice Excellence at Social Current. Her work focuses on applied developmental psychology,
educational success, policy, and advocacy, and supporting the work of the Change in Mind Institute.

References

READ PDF VERSION

This article was originally posted in CWLA’s Children’s Voice Magazine – Vol. 32 #1, 2023. To read through the entirety of Vol, 32, purchase the issue on the Child Welfare League of America’s website.

Social Current is dedicated to the growth and overall success of the social sector, and as workforce challenges continue to hinder human service organizations, we remain committed to offering solutions that will support staff and build resilience.  

In our upcoming learning series, “Building a Resilient Workforce,” Social Current experts will delve into core strategies and tactics for supporting staff, such as increasing accountability, managing conflict, nurturing relationships, embracing equity, and achieving excellence.  

Participants are sure to gain knowledge and tools to set them, and their organizations, up for success. From utilizing brain science in the workplace to fostering psychological safety to creating culture and community, this learning series will provide concrete action steps to support staff who are emotionally and physically exhausted.  

Join us for this four-part webinar series to ensure staff remain connected to the mission and vision of your organization. Register by Aug. 14 to receive the early bird rates, a savings of $15 on an individual webinar or $35 on the entire series. View full event details and register online:

Envision a workforce that feels stable, secure, and capable of thriving in the face of daily challenges. Learn more about our upcoming series and workforce resilience consulting services.

Social Current submitted a statement to the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee from President and CEO Jody Levison-Johnson and Senior Director of Government Affairs Blair Abelle-Kiser on the challenges faced by the nonprofit social sector in responding to federal grants. Among the challenges highlighted were federal contracts that don’t cover the actual cost of service delivery, the complexity of the contracting process, and a lack of funding flexibility that hampers the ability of nonprofits to innovate and address root causes. The testimony highlighted a number of solutions, including simplifying the application process, offering more consistency and transparency regarding grant application procedures and criteria, and allowing greater flexibility in the use of grant funds. It comes on the heels of an article by Jody Levison-Johnson that was published on March 30 entitled “An Urgent Response is Needed to the Dire Staff Shortages Facing NonProfit Government Contractors.”

The Senate hearing “Improving Access to Federal Grants for Underserved Communities,” took place on Tuesday, May 2, at 10 a.m. ET. For those of you who couldn’t make it, read the key takeaways Social Current put together from the hearing.

READ STATEMENT

Last week, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) released his long-awaited proposal to increase the debt limit, now standing at $31.4 trillion. In exchange for lifting the debt limit by $1.5 trillion until March 31, 2024, the plan proposes a series of budget cuts McCarthy says will decrease budget deficits by $4.5 trillion over the next decade. President Biden has dismissed budget negotiations, calling for a “clean” debt ceiling increase and delaying any negotiations about the federal budget until after. The Treasury Department says the debt ceiling must be raised as soon as possible and the government could run out of money as soon as June, setting up a tense few months on Capitol Hill.

McCarthy’s plan would immediately return the federal budget to FY 2022 levels, a $130 billion cut, as well as limit yearly increases to one percent for a decade. The plan doesn’t specify the programs that will be cut; however, Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee, Rosa DeLauro (C-Ct.), says different agencies have reported the 2022 level budget would lead to drastic impacts, including one million senior citizens losing nutrition services, 1.1 million families losing housing assistance, and 200,000 children losing access to Head Start.

Additionally, McCarthy’s plan would implement work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for adults without children until age 56, instead of age 49 under current law. Under the plan, Medicaid would also implement a work requirement of 80 hours per month, which could lead to millions being kicked off. Finally, President Biden’s student debt cancellation program, which is under consideration by the Supreme Court, would be scrapped.

Social Current will continue to monitor budget negotiations and aggressively challenge cuts to critical programs that support the health and wellbeing of vulnerable communities across the country.

HUD Selects Grantees for Choice Neighborhoods Program

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced $98 million in funds for the Choice Neighborhoods Implementation Grants program. The Choice Neighborhoods program takes a holistic approach to developing housing and increasing wellbeing in marginalized neighborhoods. Its three-pronged approach – “housing, people, and neighborhood” – involves redeveloping HUD-assisted properties while simultaneously supporting health, education, and income services in the community. New grocery stores, parks, services, and jobs, for example, are included in the program’s approach. These neighborhood improvement programs lead to private financing and economic growth. Since its inception, the Choice Neighborhoods program has led to 11,000 new mixed-income units in 44 cities, with another 32,000 units under consideration. This batch of grantees come from states across the country, including Arizona, California, Florida, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, and Virginia. 

CSBG Receives Third Funding Installment for the Year

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has released $375 million to tribes, territories and over 1,000 local Community Action Agencies through its Community Services Block Grant (CSBG). CSBG is a federally funded block grant program in the Office of Community Services within the Administration for Children and Families tackling poverty head on in communities lacking resources. The Community Action Agencies have wide leeway to choose what types of services their communities need, including housing, nutrition, employment, education, or healthcare services. Over nine million people are served annually through CSBG. The $375 million installment is the third for FY 2023, bringing the total to $750 million.

New Opportunity to Provide Health Care to Individuals Transitioning Back to Community

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a new program to allow states to provide health care to incarcerated individuals as they are about to reenter their communities. The Medicaid Reentry Section 1115 Demonstration Opportunities would allow the utilization of Medicaid funds to cover health services like substance use disorders and other chronic health conditions for up to 90 days prior to release. CMS cited a study from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which says as much as 65 percent of people who are incarcerated suffer from substance abuse disorders. It goes on to say this population is at increased risk of overdosing in the first few weeks of reentry without treatment. Providing critical health care services to this population before release lessens the challenges of transitioning back to the community and reduces recidivism.

Subscribe to the Policy and Advocacy Radar to receive our biweekly policy roundup, which includes commentary on issues in Social Current’s federal policy agenda, opportunities to take action, and curated news and opportunities.

By: Verleaner R. Lane

April has long been recognized as Child Abuse Prevention Month. This year, the conversation around prevention has broadened to include family strengthening, in recognition of the importance of families and communities having access to resources that can lessen family stressors and prevent child abuse and neglect before it occurs.

Science shows us that children are more likely to thrive when their families have the economic and social supports that they need. Enabling these positive childhood experiences requires that we reimagine child welfare and focus instead on child and family well-being with upstream resources that can prevent child abuse and neglect before it occurs.

Federal and state policies that connect families to economic support services, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), housing assistance, and nutritional supplements have been shown to strengthen families and reduce child welfare interactions.

By shifting to a preventative child and family well-being system that offers upstream resources for families, the goal is to provide families with more services rather than more surveillance.

Federal policy is supporting this shift by authorizing more funding and more flexible funding for family-strengthening services through the Family First Prevention Services Act and the proposed reauthorization of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA).

What does a family-strengthening approach to child safety look like in practice? Answering that question is the impetus behind a national demonstration initiative launched by the Department of Justice’s Office for Victims of Crime in 2019.

The project, Child Safety Forward, engaged five sites across the United States in a multi-year focus that included research, planning, and implementation around strategies aimed at reducing child injury and fatality from abuse and neglect. The sites selected are Cook County Health in Illinois; Indiana Department of Health; Michigan Department of Health and Human Services; Saint Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut; and Sacramento County, California’s Child Abuse Prevention Council. 

Each site is developing strategies that are unique and specific to their communities, honoring and reflecting the data they collected in the first year to identify community-led solutions that support resilient families and keep children safe in their homes. Each site is also working with a collaborative body of stakeholders and partners, including those with lived experience, to guide the work and is reviewing short- and long-term goals through an equity and diversity lens.

Our strategy includes bringing together a diverse group of community stakeholders that work with the most affected families in a variety of different settings. Our work has been focused on three Illinois counties: Cook, Peoria, and Vermilion, to identify the highest-risk geographic areas and target resources in these communities.

We began our efforts by using a data collection process that had been established earlier by Cook County Health in partnership with the Cook County Medical Examiner. The process automates data exchange between these two Cook County agencies allowing for the linkage of clinical data to mortality events among specific populations as determined by the medical examiner. Data sharing across these agencies is automated to identify risk factors for mortality among individuals experiencing homelessness, those impacted by the opioid epidemic, those with justice involvement, and the intersection of these experiences.

For Cook County, we reviewed approximately 300 sudden unexpected infant deaths over the past five years likely related to unsafe sleep conditions. We identified specific neighborhoods that had a higher rate of sudden unexpected infant death.

Based on these lessons learned, we are now able to appropriately target resources and educational interventions to protect families from these catastrophic events by creating the Safety for Children 0-5 self-paced educational curriculum and adding scenarios to the Simulation Labs and the MDT Training. We worked with pediatricians and community organizations to develop safe sleep messaging and interventions targeted to these high-risk neighborhoods. The program, led by 12 government and community agencies, including Project CHILD, aims to address sudden unexpected infant death (SUID), one of the leading causes of infant mortality.

Illinois Safe Sleep Support will focus on outreach and education to expand the community-based promotion of safe sleep practices, promote resources to improve safe sleep environments, identify SUID disparities, and address opportunities for improvement. The investments of this year-long campaign will continue to position Illinois as a leading state for children, families, and the early childhood workforce that supports them.

All of the strategies across the five Child Safety Forward sites share one common trait – they are predicated on demonstrating a public health approach to child and family well-being called for by the federal Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities. With a focus on increasing equity in systems that serve families, elevating parents into relationships of equal power, building protective factors, and supporting families who are having trouble weathering one or more of the storms impacting our country right now, each of the demonstration sites is working to create a body of knowledge about what works to reduce child fatalities.

As we celebrate Child Abuse Prevention, let us not forget that addressing community needs by giving families support prevents traumatic events from happening, has much more impact, and costs much less, than removing children from families and/or attempting to address the consequences of adversity after a child has grown up. 

We all have a stake in our kids’ future and shifting our focus from child welfare to child and family well-being will help us create a future where every child can thrive and reach their full potential.

Verleaner R. Lane, MA. is the Project Director for Project Child as a Visiting Project Specialist contracted employee within the Institute for Legal, Legislative, and Policy Studies (ILLAPS) at the University of Illinois at Springfield. Cook County Health established Project CHILD in 2019 to better understand and address infant deaths due to unsafe sleep conditions, or from abuse or neglect.

Disclaimer: This product was supported by cooperative agreement number 2019-V3-GX-K005, awarded by the Office for Victims of Crime, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this product are those of the contributors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. 

Social Current and the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA) want to learn from human services leaders and individuals with lived experience to inform the way we work together.

We are conducting several focus groups on advancing equity, health, and well-being in our communities and need your help spreading the word to those who have accessed services from your organization. We seek to learn from their rich perspectives and experiences of feeling valued/heard, improving service access, and addressing racial disparities and inequities.

Focus groups are virtual, and will be offered throughout April and May:

People who have experience accessing services and resources offered by your organizations will be provided a participation stipend. Space is limited, so please register in advance. Only those who have registered in advance and received confirmation can attend.

We are truly excited about this work and hope the knowledge we gain from these focus groups will help us create a leadership framework for community-based and public sector human services leaders that will change the way we work together and across boundaries.

If you have questions or need further details, please contact Trinka Landry-Bourne at tlandry-bourne@aphsa.org or Michon Hicks at mhicks@social-current.org.

At the beginning of the pandemic, states began receiving substantially more Medicaid funds from the federal government to expand access to necessary healthcare coverage. In exchange, states paused reviews of beneficiaries, a practice that had allowed states to regularly determine whether individuals or families were still eligible. This arrangement led to a 28 percent increase in enrollment in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. However, in Dec. Congress voted to allow states to commence eligibility determinations after March 31.

Arkansas, Arizona, New Hampshire, South Dakota, and Idaho will begin making eligibility determinations in April, while the rest of states will start this summer. Enrollees will be forced to provide information and documentation, like income and household size, to continue receiving health care benefits. Kaiser believes between 5 million and 14 million people could lose health coverage, while the Department of Health and Human Services estimates up to 15 million could be terminated. Georgetown University Health Policy Institute predicts almost 7 million children and teens could potentially lose coverage.

Social Current will continue to monitor these developments and work with our coalition partners in Washington, D.C., to mitigate the damage of these policy changes.

HUD Announced New Funding for Youth Aging Out of Foster Care

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced $30 million in funding for public housing authorities to address housing instability for youth who have already left or are transitioning out of foster care. The funding is part of HUD’s Foster Youth to Independence Initiative, which provides public housing agencies with funding for housing choice vouchers that can be employed in partnership with local child welfare agencies. The program is geared toward easing the transition to independence and mitigating homelessness among young people, particularly foster care youth. The Biden-Harris Administration, as part of its goal of reducing overall homelessness by 25 percent by 2025, has proposed $9 billion in its FY 2024 budget to create a permanent housing voucher program for youth, ages 18-24, who are transitioning out of foster care.  

GAO Publishes Report on CCDF

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released a report on the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), which is the main federal program that provides subsidies to states to assist low-income families access child care. The report analyzed data from FY 2019, the most recent data available, and found only 2 million out of the 8.7 million children who were eligible for CCDF subsidies participated in the program in an average month. GAO stated the discrepancy is caused by the lack of funding, requiring states to prioritize certain children over others. Also, some families are unfamiliar with the program or dissuaded from applying because of the procedural hurdles. GAO found that even families who did receive subsidies still struggle to afford child care, forcing difficult choices between child care and other priorities, like food.

New Ratings from the Family First Prevention Services Clearinghouse

The Family First Prevention Clearinghouse has posted new ratings for 12 prevention services. Two were found to be “supported,” three “promising,” and seven rated as “does not currently meet criteria.” The programs included mental health, substance abuse, and in-home parent skill-based services. So far, 141 programs and services have been reviewed, and 71 have been rated as promising, supported, or well-supported.

The new ratings are as follows:

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