COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS & LINKAGES: REACHING OUT TO WORK TOGETHER — HANDOUT AND TRANSPARENCY 2.5

A Snapshot:
Family- and Community-Centered
Child Welfare Practice

Conventional Child Welfare	Family-Centered Child Welfare	Community-Centered Child Welfare
Engagement
Efforts are focused on getting the facts and information and not on building relationships.	Families are engaged in ways that are relevant to the situation and sensitive to the values of their culture.	The focus is on family strengths (including community resources, culture, lifestyle) as building blocks for services. Other strategies:
Assessment
Assessment focuses on the facts related to the reported abuse and neglect—the primary goal is to identify psychopathology in the perpetrator.	Assessment protocols look at families' capabilities, strengths and resources throughout the life of the case and are continuously assessed and discussed.	Assessment includes an evaluation of service needs based on information obtained from other agencies such as the schools, churches, medical agencies, etc. Assessment explores community support systems. Other strategies:
Safety planning
The safety plan is developed by child protective services staff, courts, or lawyers—with little input from the family or those who know the child.	Families are involved in designing a safety plan based on information and support of worker/team members.	Extended family and community members—neighbors, community groups—participate in the development of a safety plan. Other strategies:
Service Planning
The worker prepares the family's plan for services and presents it to the family for signature.	Family members are involved in designing a plan for the services and supports they need to keep children safe, at home, and developing, with support of worker/team members.	Extended family members, people from the family's social network (for example, friends, school personnel, people from their church, etc.), and potential service providers work together as a team to develop the plan. Other strategies:
Out-of-home placement
Biological, adoptive and foster families and the agencies that served these groups have little contact with one another.	Partnerships are built between families and foster/adoptive families, or other placement providers. Respectful, non-judgmental and non-blaming approaches are encouraged.	Planning, provision of supports, and placement is done with the support of staff in community, making all efforts for children to remain close enough to allow parent/child visitation (especially for younger children). Other strategies:
Implementation of service plan
Implementation most often consists of determining whether the family has complied with the case plan, rather than providing services and supports or coordinating with informal and formal resources.	Workers ensure that families have reasonable access to a flexible, affordable, individualized array of services and resources so they can maintain themselves as a family.	A range of services in the community ensure that the plan for parents and child(ren) responds to all domains needed (e.g. school performance, health, physical well-being, transportation, income maintenance). Other strategies:
Permanency planning
Alternative permanency plans are introduced only after efforts at parental rehabilitation are unsuccessful.	Families, child welfare workers, community members and service providers work together in developing alternate forms of permanency.	Coordinated and high-quality services called for in the case plan are readily available in the community so parents can make changes within the available times. Other strategies:
Reevaluation of the Service Plan
Few efforts are dedicated to determining the progress of the family in reaching the plan's outcomes. Re-evaluation results are not shared with the families.	Information from the family, children, support teams, and service providers is continuously shared with the service system to ensure that intervention strategies can be modified as needed to support positive outcomes.	All the people who have been involved in the service planning and implementation need to meet regularly to assess how the plan is going and if and how the plan should be modified, and who will be responsible for what tasks. Other strategies: