Washington | January 2025
04 | Authorship and Acknowledgements
05 | Executive Summary
07 | Introduction
09 | Methodology
11 | SIDEBAR: About Washington State
15 | Strategy Recommendations 18 | Co-design
25 | EXHIBIT: Systems Map
30 | Collaboration
34 | EXHIBIT: Key Collaborators
36 | Finance
37 | EXHIBIT: Federal Funding
40 | Learning
41 | EXHIBIT: Baseline Data
45 | Scope of Future Work
48 | EXHIBIT: Theory of Change
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The Foster America team was honored to have the opportunity to work with the Washington Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) to complete this Discovery process. The team included three specialists: Collaborative Design Specialist Aminata Simbo, who led the site team; Collaborative Design Specialist Gabrielle Garcia; Fiscal Innovation Specialist D.L. Moffitt; and Senior Director of Discovery and Engagement Danielle Martin. Numerous Foster America colleagues and consultants contributed to this Discovery including Courtney Franklin, Sarah Zlotnick, Emily Ente, and Noelle Russell. We also recognize the contributions of our executive team, including Marie Zemler Wu, Brian Clapier, and JoAnne Scribner in shaping this report. Special thanks to DCYF Assistant Secretary Vickie Ybarra from Partnership, Prevention, and Services; Director Sarah Veele from the Office of Innovation, Alignment, and Accountability; Director Judy King of Family and Community Support; and Director Maria Zdzieblowski of Service Continuum. These leaders and their teams were instrumental in coordinating site visits and facilitating opportunities for learning from DCYF partners. We are particularly grateful to the DCYF project leaders for focused, purposeful collaboration on this project, even as gubernatorial and agency leadership changes were imminent. The reflection on prevention efforts to date, wealth of resources shared, and access to the plethora of DCYF prevention services allowed our team to gain a broad understanding of DCYF’s strengths and opportunities ahead. Our partnership with the Ballmer Group — in particular with Kody Russell — was an essential asset to this Discovery process. We appreciate not only the grant funding that launched this work, but the invaluable resources and relationships shared. Finally, we are grateful to alumni of the Foster America fellowship and community leaders in Washington who shared their insights. In future phases of the work, we are eager to connect with more of the advocates, lived experts, tribal leaders, community partners, and public sector leaders. Their insights will be indispensable in continuing to refine a roadmap to systems transformation — for a future in which every family thrives.
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The culmination of a six-month participatory Discovery Process, this report outlines a strategic path for Washington state’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families with its partners to emphasize prevention strategies that decrease child maltreatment, stabilize families, and reduce entries into foster care. The Roadmap Report reflects insights gathered from reviewing existing documents and policies; conducting interviews with agency leaders, community partners, and individuals with lived experience; and analyzing current data and funding structures. These findings inform recommendations across four key areas : co-design, collaboration, finance, and learning .
KEY RECOMMENDATIONS: Co-design
• Establish a prevention advisory council with at least 50% membership from individuals with lived experience in the child welfare system. • Enhance infrastructure to support and align existing lived-expert groups. • Gather direct feedback from families to pinpoint barriers to accessing services and prioritize solutions that address those challenges. Update the provided systems map accordingly to reflect these perspectives.
Collaboration
• Establish an internal Prevention Steering Committee and overall prevention governance structure to integrate and align work within DCYF. • Design a prevention framework for DCYF that enhances cross system collaboration and community based supports. • Enhance the engagement and referral pathways for secondary and community-based prevention.
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Finance
• Enhance and modify strategies for Title IV-E claiming to maximize federal funding allowances under the Family First Prevention Services Act and to align with new guidance provided by ACF. • Prioritize technology enhancements to address existing gaps in the current State Automated Child Welfare Information System (SACWIS) system while simultaneously planning for a smooth transition to the new Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System (CCWIS). • Simplify procurement processes to secure the services families need and want. • Use data to understand baseline performance, establish prevention measures for ongoing tracking. Communicate these learnings more broadly and consistently to support data consumption. • Analyze the priority populations being served and the expansion efforts in place for direct prevention-service and economic-support distribution. • Pursue a shared learning agenda with intergovernmental and provider agency partners, focused first on data sharing, fiscal maximization, and service referrals.
Learning
This work lays the foundation for a three-year engagement, supported by funding from the Ballmer Group, to advance these strategies and drive meaningful systems change. Foster America stands ready to support DCYF in this journey, including embedding dedicated staff to guide implementation, foster collaboration, and ensure these strategies translate into measurable improvements for families across Washington.
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The Washington Department of Children, Youth, and Families’ mission is to protect children and strengthen families so they flourish. Established in 2017, the agency comprises three previously separate agencies, uniting child care, juvenile rehabilitation, and child welfare into an integrated department offering a continuum of support to Washington families. The Roadmap Report summarizes a six-month “Discovery Process” — a collaboration between DCYF and Foster America, funded by the Ballmer Group. Together, we’ve explored opportunities for systems transformation, identifying how DCYF can continue and accelerate efforts already underway to safely reduce the use of traditional child welfare interventions while bolstering approaches that promote child and family well-being within communities. Our shared goal is to enhance the prevention services and supports available to children, youth, and families — specifically, preventing child abuse and neglect as well as unnecessary formal child welfare systems involvement. We’ve developed this report in support of Washington DCYF’s ultimate commitment to ensuring that comprehensive, responsive, and equitable prevention services reach children, youth, and families statewide. DCYF was founded around the vision of developing a holistic, sustainable continuum of prevention supports — addressing the varied and sometimes complex needs of families and communities early, in the least restrictive manner. Since that time, the federal Family First Prevention Services Act (and Washington State’s planning and early implementation of the law has opened further options and funding sources to meet families’ needs without family separation and child welfare placement. Further, the state’s Keeping Families Together Act, which took effect in 2023, tightened the statutory requirements for child removals. With the Keeping Families Together Act’s passage, DCYF sharpened its focus on safely reducing the number of children placed into foster care, reducing racial disproportionality in the child welfare system, and supporting relatives who care for children who must be removed from their home of origin to ameliorate safety concerns. Against this backdrop and throughout the Discovery Process, the Foster America team has been inspired by the DCYF team and their community and inter - governmental partners’ commitment to and preparedness for change. They seek a coordinated cross-system, community-centered approach. Within DCYF, each team we met was responsive, engaged, and focused on improving how families and children in Washington are served.
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Further foundational strengths include the diverse array of resources DCYF and its partners offer (though those resources may remain challenging for families to find and navigate). With these strengths in mind, our Discovery efforts sought opportunities where DCYF can bolster internal alignment, and cross-systems collaboration can enhance response to community-identified needs. Foster America’s role, reflected in this report, was to capture the current state of DCYF prevention efforts, including strengths and challenges, then develop systems-improvement recommendations, including a proposed approach on ways Foster America can support the implementation of those recommendations.
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Methodology At Foster America, we believe that systems transformation — work to diminish the need for traditional child welfare interventions and bolster prevention-oriented, well-being alternatives — requires four key capacities: • Co-design: Transformation
happens together with families and communities, with their voices and needs at the center of solutions. Trust between communities that the system is meant to serve and the government delivering the support is necessary so services are designed around shared vision and goals. • Collaboration: Family and child well-being cannot be operationally achieved via child protective services alone. We support transformation efforts by facilitating alignment across
CO-DESIGN
LEARNING
CO-COLLABORATE
EQUITY
FINANCE
governmental agencies, nonprofit organizations, and community partners to implement responsive approaches that families truly want. • Finance: We recognize that traditional funding structures promote intervention over prevention. We work to reprioritize resources toward voluntary supports and services, including those that bolster economic prosperity, and away from punitive models. • Learning: Change requires investment in and capacity for qualitative and quantitative data collection, then use of that data in decision- making, iteration, and shared accountability. We advance data use for adaptation, continual improvement, and scaling what works. These capacities, when used in tandem, lead to equitable outcomes — a future where race, gender identity, income, or zip code don’t predict results. A future where all families thrive.
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In every Discovery Process, we seek information about the current context and strengths in each of these areas. We then identify opportunities for change, offering recommendations in each area. To inform our recommendations, the Foster America team embraced a mixed-methods learning process. Elements included: • Reviewing pertinent reports, literature, policies, and recent evaluations completed by DCYF and its collaborators to gain context on the current state of prevention services in Washington. 1 • Conducting empathy interviews 2 with agency leadership and staff, as well as a number of lived experts, service providers, technical assistance (TA) organizations, and community partners, to develop an inventory of systems and community strengths and opportunities for change. • Mapping the system and its stakeholders to reveal gaps and priority opportunities, ensuring a shared understanding of relationships. • Analyzing data quality and availability to propose a set of baseline measures — created from readily available data — which DCYF could use to routinely track progress on prevention initiatives. • Analyzing prevention finances and funding structures to identify opportunities for increasing federal funding, diversifying funding sources, and sustaining prevention program funding. • Proposing a theory of change and scope of work for a three-year engagement between Foster America and DCYF to guide decision making on future collaboration. Since launching the Discovery Process in Washington in July 2024, our team contacted 92 individuals through 20 interviews, one mapping session, and five small-group listening sessions. This roadmap report represents the cumulative insights. 1 Reviewed: DCYF prevention dashboard, WA ECF Final Report, DCYF Community Engagement links and resources, Strengthening Families Locally Preliminary Report on Sensemaker Themes, Strengthening Families Locally website, Family Resource Center Landscape Report, Expanding Support for Families in Pierce County, Family Connects Voluntary Brief, Home Visiting at a Glance, Child Welfare Early Learning Navigator Brief, Office of Racial Equity and Social Justice Framework, WA FFPSA plan and other documents/sites. 2 Rosario, K. ( 2023, October 1). Liberatory Consciousness in Action: Engaging Community through Empathy Interviews. LEE . https://wearelee.org/blog/liberatory-consciousness-in-action-engaging-community-through-empathy-interviews/#:~:text=Empathy%2 0interviews%20are%20a%20method,impact%20on%20community%20members’%20lives.
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About Washington State
Washington is home to 7.8 million people (2022) and has one of the fastest-growing populations in the nation, with an increase of 15% between 2010 and 2020. The state ranks 13th for population and 18th for size. The state’s capital is Olympia. The largest city is Seattle, with nearly 750,000 residents. Nearby cities to Olympia include Tacoma, also on the Puget Sound, and the other major urban areas include Spokane in the east and Vancouver in the southwest. Washington has 39 counties, divided into seven service regions. The Census Bureau reports that individuals residing in Washington are 65% non-hispanic White, 14% Hispanic or Latino, 11% Asian, 5% Black, and 2% American Indian/Alaska Native. There is a significantly larger Asian population and smaller Black population in the state compared to the national average.
Race/Ethnicity Demographics
POPULATION
333.3 million
National
Washington
7.8 million
0.00%
20.00%
40.00%
60.00%
80.00%
100.00%
n Asian/Pacific Islander n Latino/Hispanic n Two or more races
n Black/African American
n Native Amerian/Alaskan Native
n White (non-Hispanic)
Source: U.S. Census Quickfacts
There are 29 federally recognized tribes in Washington. DCYF has a dedicated Office of Tribal Relations, which supports DCYF’s work with the tribes. The Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe is the first tribe in Washington state approved to license and operate its own foster care program. Washington ranks 16th for child well-being, according to Annie E. Casey Foundation’s KIDS COUNT Data Book, with low ratings across children’s economic, health, and educational well-being metrics. Washington is stronger in health outcomes, ranking sixth in the country. Outcomes related to maternal and child health also exceed national averages.
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SNAP, Child Medicaid and CHIP
38%
National
10%
26%
Washington
11%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
n SNAP households with children n Medicaid Child + CHIP Enrollment
Source: SNAP – USDA.gov (2020) Medicaid – Medicaid.gov (August 2023)
Although the state is home to a number of major industry leaders in technology, engineering, agriculture, goods and services, many residents are experiencing hardship due to an increasingly high cost of living.
Persons and Children Living in Poverty
11.5%
National
16%
10%
Washington
12%
0.0%
5.0%
10.0%
15.0%
20.0%
n Persons in poverty n Children in poverty
Source: Persons in poverty – U.S. Census Quickfacts Children in poverty by state – Annie E. Casey Kids Count Children in poverty by county – CountyHealthRatings.org
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Within DCYF, work is guided by its 2021-2026 Strategic Priorities, 3 a plan outlining six focus areas including eliminating racial disproportionality and safely reducing the number of children and youth in out-of-home care by half. Although DCYF leadership has remained relatively stable over the past five years, direct-service staff turnover has been high, around 26% based on external turnover data, with an overall turnover rate including internal movement reaching approximately 40%. Governor-elect Democrat Bob Ferguson, previously the State Attorney General, assumes office in January 2025. On Dec. 19, 2024, Ferguson announced Rep. Tana Senn as the next Secretary of the Department of Children, Youth, and Families. Legislative action/litigation have substantially shaped prevention services: • WA HB 1661, signed on July 6, 2017, created DCYF, restructuring how the state serves children, youth, and families with the goal of preventing harm and producing better outcomes. After a transition year in 2017, early childhood and child welfare functions integrated in July 2018, with juvenile rehabilitation joining a year later. • WA HB 2525 (2019-20 legislative session) requires DYCF to contract for the Family Connections Program, a program to build positive connections between parents and caregivers for children in out-of-home placements, with one location in Eastern Washington and one location in Western Washington. • WA HB 1900 (2019) defines prevention and family services and programs in alignment with the federal Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA). • WA HB 1109 (2019) appropriates $7.6 million of the general fund solely for DYCF to leverage federal Title IV-E funds available under FFPSA for qualifying services and families. • WA SB 6168 (Enacted — Partial Veto, 2020) makes appropriations, including funds for DCYF, to leverage federal Title IV-E funds available under the FFPSA. • In 2021, the Washington State Legislature passed HB 1227, the Keeping Families Together Act, recognizing that children are best served when “cared for by their loved ones and in their communities.” This act raised the evidentiary standard for when children can be removed from
3 DCYF (2021). The Department of Children, Youth, and Families Strategic Priorities 2021-2026. 4 Washington Courts (July 2023). HB 1227: Keeping Families Together Act
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their homes — allowing placement only in response to risk of “imminent physical harm.” It also codified that “community or family poverty, isolation, single parenthood, age of the parent, crowded or inadequate housing, substance abuse, prenatal drug or alcohol exposure, mental illness, disability or special needs of the parent or child, or nonconforming social behavior does not by itself constitute imminent physical harm.” • On Sept. 3, 2020, the Washington State Supreme Court issued an opinion in the In re Dependency of Z.J.G and M.E.J.G. holding that a court has a “reason to know” that a child is or may be an Indian child when a participant in the child custody proceeding indicates that the child has tribal heritage. The Supreme Court’s opinion clarifies that if there is any indication from any participant that a child has tribal heritage, the protections under the federal Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) must be applied. This expansion in “reason to know” will increase the number of child welfare cases in which these protections apply. Additionally, DCYF must improve its culturally relevant and responsive service delivery in which there is “reason to know.” • On June 24, 2021, a court opinion in In re Dependency of G.J.A, A.R.A., S.S.A., and V.A., clarified “active efforts” the department must make to prevent the breakup of the Indian family. It also specified that services provided to prevent out-of-home placement and termination of parental rights must be culturally appropriate to the child’s tribal heritage. To meet this higher standard in these cases, DCYF will need to increase staff to provide collaborative case planning and implementation, train staff, monitor and promote policy compliance, and expand contracts with tribes to provide culturally appropriate services to Native families in the expanded number of cases in which ICWA and WICWA apply. • A federal class-action lawsuit, D.S. v. DCYF, was filed in 2021 by Disability Rights Washington, the National Center for Youth Law, and Carney Gillespie PLLP . 5 The lawsuit was settled in June 2022. The settlement agreement laid out a plan for DCYF to “better provide for dependent children with behavioral health and developmental disabilities to be promptly reunified with their families and adequately supported while in out-of-home care.” 6 • In 2022, after 24 years, the state exited Braam vs. State of Washington, a class-action lawsuit to improve conditions for children in foster care. 7
5 Disability Rights Washington (n.d.). D.S. V. DCYF. 6 Fitzgerald, M. (2022, June 9). Washington settles lawsuit involving foster youth left sleeping in offices and hotels. The Imprint. 7 Columbia Legal Services (2019, Feb 1). Braam v Washington.
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Following our analysis, the Foster America team integrated insights across our methodologies and developed a proposed roadmap for the systems transformation work ahead. Our recommendations are designed to increase families’ access to equitable, timely, holistic, and culturally relevant services, with clear pathways to navigate available resources that prevent child abuse and neglect as well as formal child welfare systems involvement. In the following sections, we share 12 recommendations, organized around the systems-change capacities of co-design, collaboration, finance, and learning. In each, we highlight a central theme, naming the intended result of building capacity in each of these four areas. Here, we offer an overview of the themes before exploring each in greater detail.
CO-DESIGN THEME: ACCESS
Washington State offers varied resources — including concrete economic assistance — to children, youth, and families. This includes offerings directly created or funded by DCYF and offerings generated by other inter-governmental, tribal, and community organizations. While services and supports may exist, families still experience many gaps: in finding the right assistance when and where they need it, in finding assistance that reflects their real needs and cultures, and even in benefiting from the services they do receive. Many families face barriers accessing available resources, despite their existence and potential impact. Co-design should play a central role in bridging these gaps in access, ensuring that families and communities are actively involved in shaping prevention strategies and service offerings. To improve families’ access to support they truly need and want, we recommend taking steps to ensure community voice and lived-experience perspectives guide decisions related to prevention. We suggest strategies for building family and lived-expert advisory structures, with the future goal that prevention offerings are rooted in the actual experiences of those who are today unnecessarily impacted by the child welfare system.
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COLLABORATION THEME: ALIGNMENT Child welfare, early childhood, and juvenile rehabilitation work are united under DCYF. Within the agency, strong equity, data, finance, and community engagement teams contribute to building community pathways for families to receive preventive support. Still, bureaucratic silos divide the service-delivery continuum, fiscal structures, technology systems, and data reporting. These divisions impact what services are offered, interrupt potential referral opportunities for earlier interventions, and limit federal funding. To strengthen alignment, we recommend a participatory governance structure to enhance coordination inside DCYF as well as between the agency and community/intergovernmental partners. Across its own teams and divisions, DCYF interacts with many families who can benefit from preventive supports, particularly families for which secondary prevention offerings after first contact with DCYF could prevent later escalation and higher-acuity needs. We propose strategies to foster better internal communication and a stronger understanding of circumstances that are likely to lead to further systems involvement, so that DCYF can harness opportunities to offer earlier interventions to families, increase well-being, and reduce future risk.
FINANCE THEME: AGILITY
Agility in this context refers to the agency’s ability to promptly adapt when policies change or the needs of children, youth, and families evolve. Agility in child welfare can at times be limited by administrative constraints and or blind spots regarding the shifting needs of communities and families. We aspire to demonstrate strengths in DCYF’s capacity to be agile, as well as opportunities in this area. Considering a rapid decline in the rate of foster-care placement and DCYF’s growing commitment to a robust prevention-service continuum, sustainable prevention funding pipelines are urgently needed. This requires DCYF’s fiscal team and the agency as a whole to demonstrate agility — responding quickly, reallocating resources effectively, and embracing innovative approaches to meet evolving demands. We recommend further leveraging the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) to expand claims for federal Title IV-E reimbursements, using it as a catalyst to prioritize funding for evidence-based prevention services.
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DCYF has identified a need to streamline claiming processes and has asked Foster America to leverage support in this area. Foster America will provide technical assistance to develop and implement a fiscal focus group for this purpose. This will require nimble efforts at the intersection of finance, data, and practice — including strengthening technology infrastructure. Further, we recommend strategies for working more flexibly with community providers to procure prevention services quicker and more readily from culturally responsive organizations.
LEARNING THEME: ACCOUNTABILITY
The DCYF team produces and uses an extensive array of data: for reporting requirements, performance management, continuous improvement, and evaluation purposes. Data collection/use related to families experiencing formal child welfare systems involvement is well established, including as an accountability tool with federal partners, the state Legislature, community advocates, and parties in class-action settlement agreements. In contrast, data collection/use around prevention efforts is emerging, with work to define meaningful metrics, establish tracking methods, and use data to inform decision-making still evolving. Strengthening accountability for prevention will require creating clear, measurable benchmarks that reflect progress in providing voluntary supports that reduces formal systems involvement. A robust accountability framework ensures transparency, builds trust, and enables DCYF to demonstrate its commitment to prevention-focused outcomes to all stakeholders. We recommend elevating a set of prevention measures for routine use, building accountability mechanisms that highlight prevention in addition to more traditionally tracked child-welfare metrics. To reach this goal, we further recommend developing shared definitions for prevention success and establishing data-sharing agreements with intergovernmental partners.
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CURRENT CONTEXT AND STRENGTHS In this section, we examine these areas of capacity building in greater detail. We begin by sharing context and strengths, the foundation on which DCYF can build their future efforts, then identify opportunities, making recommendations for priority steps for systems transformation. Washington DCYF seeks to “create a culture of community participation in family well-being and child safety, with the intention of reducing the stigma of seeking help” and demonstrates a strong commitment to taking a community-centered approach in the supports they offer and the ways they develop prevention strategies. DCYF offers a wide array of services across the prevention service continuum — both directly and through contracting with partner organizations. Building the ways that families can voluntarily access prevention supports without first becoming formally child welfare systems-involved is an active work-in-progress for Washington DCYF. One example of such work is through “community pathway” development, as the state aspires to grow pilot programs that are already impactful and well-regarded by families — approaches such as Plans of Safe Care and Community Family Resource Centers — making them readily available as voluntary community programming. A highly valued part of the current continuum is navigational programming, which helps families find and access the supports for which they are eligible. Several navigator approaches are led and/or staffed with peer models or specialized staff, in which those providing assistance to families have similar lived experiences to those they are assisting. A further strength in Washington is the commitment to addressing the ways that material economic supports — things like food, housing, and stable income — can stabilize families. Both inside of DCYF and through the distribution of concrete supports by programs administered through partners agencies, options for meeting families’ concrete economic needs are a valuable part of the prevention continuum. DCYF is deeply committed to community input as the continuum of prevention supports continues to develop. DCYF actively engages communities to help inform decisions on the types of supports offered, program locations, family engagement strategies, and the overall experience of accessing resources. In four Washington communities, the Strengthening Families Locally initiative is partnering with community organizations, government, tribes, schools, families, and volunteers to
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design community-driven solutions that increase family resilience and reduce rates of child maltreatment and entry into foster care. Their work included requesting and reviewing DCYF data, which not only informed local planning but led to a statewide prevention data dashboard. They also collected and sought — and continued to seek — family stories, reporting on themes across their four sites to inform statewide prevention planning. 8 The early learnings from Strengthening Families Locally have highlighted the experiences of families and children seeking services and support within their communities. This endeavor is supported through funding from the Administration for Children, Youth and Families to work with community members in Bremerton, Port Angeles/Sequim, Spokane, and Stevens counties. Partnerships with community organizations, government, tribes, schools, families, and volunteers in these service areas are tasked with designing community-driven solutions to prevent child abuse and strengthen community supports for families. Within DCYF, constituent outreach and input efforts are organized by the Community Engagement Team. This team spearheads communications with external partners and supports numerous advisory bodies across the state. DCYF has a positive record of engaging with advisory groups — including councils they convene as well as via partnership with community-led bodies. These advisory and governance structures have been a major mechanism for harnessing the power and perspective of lived experience to inform several DCYF strategies and actions. Recent areas of DCYF reform that were co-designed with constituents with lived experience include service arrays for transition-age youth, development of kinship licensing portals, and determination of results-based accountability measures in provider contracts for independent living and placement services. Further, the collection of projects under the DCYF Thriving Families initiative — all bodies of work with significant planning or redesign elements — all include substantive input from impacted community members. It should be noted that further examination of the through lines between the Community Engagement Team and DCYF is necessary to better understand the ways in which this team can support FFPSA and prevention efforts. For example, there may be facilitation or planning opportunities that would allow the Community Engagement Team to take a more proactive and lead role. Much of the current community engaging relative to FFPSA and prevention is led by DCYF. It is recognized that limitations may occur because of limited resources and competing priorities of the Community Engagement Team as well.
8 Clarke, B. (2024). Strengthening Families Locally (SFL): Preliminary Report on Sensemaker Themes from Exploratory Analysis.
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Washington’s commitment to lived experts and advisory councils is reflected in this sampling of key advisory structures: • Early Learning Advisory Council: Comprises DCYF leaders and parents, child care providers, health and safety experts, legislators, tribal nations, and others interested in early learning. Provides input and to DCYF and ensures strategies are well informed and supported. • Provider Supports Subcommittee: A subcommittee of the Early Learning Advisory Council. Discusses and advises on services related to child-care licensing, including policies, procedures, and support mechanisms for providers. • Community Child Care Forums: Unites child care providers. Offers opportunities to engage with DCYF leadership, receive updates, etc. • Parent Advisory Group: Includes diverse families of children with developmental and special needs with representation from the six service regions. The advisory promotes parental participation in decision-making and acts as a sounding board for actions, topics, and questions that influence DCYF’s future. • State Interagency Coordinating Council: Advocates for early intervention services tailored to the needs of infants and toddlers with disabilities and provides advice and support to DCYF and other state agencies on the coordinated system of early supports, early-intervention policy and coordination opportunities. • County Interagency Coordinating Councils (34 serving 39 counties): Focus on increasing community capacity for early intervention programming and making services more accessible to families locally. • Foster Parent 1624 Consultation Teams (6 regional teams): Composed of foster parents and DCYF employees. Discuss statewide concerns and offer a forum for collaboration to enhance the foster care system. • Home Visiting Advisory Committee: Includes home-visiting providers, advocates, state agency partners, and other professionals. Oversees and guides home-visiting system-development, programs, concentrating on developing and growing services while making sure initiatives are effectively designed and carried out to assist families.
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• Children’s Justice Act Task Force: An interdisciplinary membership group. Improves child protection policies and programs in order to create, implement, and operate initiatives that advance children’s safety and protection. • Passion to Action Advisory Board: A statewide youth and alumni advisory board to DCYF. The members provide valuable insights and feedback on DCYF publications, procedures, training courses, and policies, ensuring that caseworkers, foster parents, and the public are informed. These groups each have varied degrees of lived-experience perspective and community voice, as well as varied levels of influence in relation to their respective charters. Still, their quantity and breadth demonstrate DCYF’s commitment to and experience with engaging constituents and professionals in shaping their design choices. OPPORTUNITIES AND RECOMMENDATIONS RECOMMENDATION 1: Establish and maintain a community-led prevention dedicated advisory committee. Although DCYF has successfully integrated lived expertise in many areas of its work, our Discovery Process revealed opportunities to strengthen prevention- focused planning and implementation through the creation of a dedicated advisory committee. Although community pathway and prevention service choices are being actively designed, the efforts need a formal mechanism for those choices to be informed by lived-expert perspectives. Creating active structures to invite community and lived-experience voices could guide stronger practice and implementation decisions. As the state’s prevention infrastructure develops, co-design structures are essential for grounding new approaches in the lived experiences of those the well- being system aims to support. We suggest that DCYF reserve at least half of the positions on the prevention advisory council for members whose lived experience with child welfare systems informs their perspectives. Further, we suggest this prevention advisory body’s responsibilities include reviewing and providing recommendations on what community resources are developed, determining how families access them, and setting priorities for design and implementation. For the prevention advisory council to succeed in this charge, DCYF must create infrastructure for educating participants on the current system and sharing data to inform their recommendations (also see Recommendations 10 and 11 ).
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Infrastructure is essential for selecting members, supporting their professional development, and compensating members for their time and expertise. Finally, we recommend the prevention advisory council be an integrated part of a larger governance structure, informing the work of a prevention steering committee at DCYF (see Recommendations 4 and 5 for more on governance structures and the development of a prevention framework) . RECOMMENDATION 2: Enhance infrastructure to better support existing lived-expert groups. In developing a prevention advisory structure, it is critical to observe and/or further evaluate other current advisory bodies to understand how a prevention-focused group can align efforts and reduce redundancies. Coordination among these groups increases their ability to inform policy and practice changes as well as innovate across public health, education, human services, courts, and other public systems that influence prevention (see Recommendation 12) . Further, learning from the well-established community engagement efforts already in place can harness existing strengths. Also notable, the groups referenced above are largely DCYF- or provider-oriented. Their focus areas and agendas are predominantly set by administrative entities. Any future prevention-centered council has the opportunity to share leadership between community and governmental members — or shift power even more fully and embrace a community-driven agenda. This work should utilize and build upon the Washington State Office of Equity compensation guidelines as well as the draft of the engagement standards. RECOMMENDATION 3: Gather direct feedback from families to pinpoint barriers to accessing services and prioritize solutions that address those challenges. Our systems map offers a starting point for understanding what exists in the DCYF prevention continuum and the most substantive access gaps. Created primarily from facilitated sessions with DCYF staff, supplemented by literature reviews and interviews, it captures the needs and conditions that families face and is sorted into three major categories: concrete supports and services, education, and health. Much of the written content reviewed by Foster America revealed that there is a great deal of information and qualitative data gathered from outreach to engage lived experts. From there, DCYF prevention offerings are matched to the needs or conditions to which they correspond. A fourth section of the map sets DCYF in the context of partnership and advocacy groups, denoting where prevention supports may be commonly provided by inter-governmental and community partners.
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This analysis already reveals several gaps and opportunities that, if addressed, can positively impact families’ experience. The major findings of the mapping work are catalogued here (color coded to correspond with their illustration on the map):
Concrete Supports & Services
• Challenges in identifying and engaging families experiencing economic hardships hinder the ability to deliver prevention services that address their material needs. • Economic hardships continue to outpace the system’s capacity to respond, signaling a need for expanded resources and support mechanisms. • Highly regarded early learning navigational supports, currently available in only three regions, are in high demand, creating clear potential for broader scaling to meet family needs. • Access in rural communities is limited by geographic distance and provider availability. • Aligning partnership priorities presents an opportunity to better connect families with housing, economic, and employment resources that fall outside DCYF’s direct purview. • Support, expand, and connect navigational efforts to best support families getting what they need. • Frequent changes in service and supports available in communities complicate navigators’ ability to provide the latest information to families and align their approaches effectively .
Education
• School personnel are the source of many calls to the child welfare hotline, with reports disproportionately centering children of color. This underscores the need for alternatives to mandated reporting. • Vocational supports are limited, presenting an opportunity to expand, programs that help families achieve economic stability and long-term success. • There is a shortage of high-quality affordable child care.
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Health
• Substance-use disorders are regularly reported as a root cause of safety concerns that lead to children being placed in out-of-home care. • Concrete and preventive supports could be linked to times of elevated need, such as following childbirth or after a medical emergency. • There is a need to align partnership priorities, as behavioral health supports are provided outside of DCYF and coordination of services is needed when substance use co-occurs with other needs. • Nurse corps offer a chance for coordination between families, health, schools, and DCYF. • Universal primary prevention is stigma free and presents opportunities for additional early engagement. Because of the current focus on secondary and tertiary needs, there may be opportunities to expand primary prevention with DCYF as the Prevent Child Abuse America chapter. • Plans of safe care are well-regarded, with opportunities for scaling. • An increased emphasis on family voice/lived-expertise perspectives would strengthen DCYF’s ability to identify needs and shape effective responses. • Differences in prevention language and definitions exacerbate silos. • Potential exists to blend and braid federal Medicaid, TANF, and home-visiting funds. • There is presently minimal federal claiming of Title IV-E funds. We propose using this tool with families who have experienced systems involvement as well as with families who have benefitted (or could benefit) from the DCYF prevention continuum. This can be an activity of an advisory group and/or a series of empathy interviews with families. The purpose is to validate the DCYF understanding of the prevention continuum, learn how families interface with what’s offered, and prioritize supports that mean the most to families. The system map functions as a living document. Partnerships and Advocacy
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DCYF System Map
Concrete Supports& Services
The needs and conditions they face and the DCYF services and supports created to respond
Children, Youth and Families
Education
Health
The context that shapes families’ access to preventive
services and supports, and influences DCYF’s policies and programs
Partnerships & Advocacy
Legislative Budget
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Families seek access to these highly regarded navigation supports, but they are available in only 3 regions
Children, Youth and Families
Economic hardships are greater than system capacity to
Access in rural
communities is limited by geographic distance and provider availability
Concrete Supports & Services
respond
There is a need to align partnership priorities, as most housing, economic, and employment resources are outside DCYF
Enhanced Protective Capacity
Economic & Employment Support
Resource Navigation
Material Needs
Housing
Child Support
Employment Services
Stipends & Subsidies
Family Resource Centers
More communication, coordination, and capacity help bridge FRCs and navigators
Parent Navigators
Help Me Grow
Peer Mentors
Parents for Parents
211
Ongoing changes in service arrays make navigators’ work more challenging
Diaper Banks
Food Banks
Family Experience or Need
Current Connection
Combined In-Home Services
Parent Education Programs
Teen/Family Reconciliation Services
Crisis Respite
DCYF Offering
High-Impact Opportunity
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Children, Youth and Families
School personnel are the source of many calls to the child welfare hotline, with reports disproportionately centering children of color
Education
Few vocational supports offered
Post- Secondary, Vocational
Family Education
Birth to Age Five
School Age: K to 12
Play & Learn Groups
Shortages of high-quality child care
Head Start, Early Childhood Education & Assistance Program
Child Welfare Early Learning Navigators
Generational Early Learning Program
High- Quality Childcare
Family Experience or Need
Current Connection
DCYF Offering
High-Impact Opportunity
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Substance use disorders are regularly reported as a root cause of safety concerns that lead to children being placed in out-of-home care
Children, Youth and Families
Health
Concrete and preventive supports could be linked to times of elevated need, such as child birth or medical emergency
Nurse corps offer a chance for coordination between families, health, schools, and DCYF
Physical Health
Behavioral Health
Mental Health
There is a need to align
partnership priorities, as behavioral health supports are provided outside of DCYF and coordination of services is needed when substance use co-occurs with other needs
School Age K to 12 Needs
Birth to Age 5 Needs
Prenatal Needs
Adult Needs
School Nurse Corps
Early Intervention
Family Connects
In-Home Care
Doulas & Midwives
Universal, primary prevention is stigma free and presents opportunities for additional early engagement
Substance Abuse Disorder
Adult Needs
Domestic Violence
Child Needs
Youth Needs
Perinatal Mental Health Communities
Placement and Stability Services
SUD Treatment Providers
Domestic Violence Services
Plans of Safe Care
Family Experience or Need
Plans of safe care are well-regarded, with opportunities for scaling
Current Connection
DCYF Offering
High-Impact Opportunity
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Children, Youth and Families
Increased family voice would better identify needs and shape effective responses
Partnership & Advocacy
Lived Experience Advocates
Federal
Tribal Governmental
State
Constituent Voices
Department of Social and Health Services
Department of Children Youth and Families
Department of Commerce
Housing Authorities
Department of Health
Judicial
Difference in prevention language and definitions exacerbates silos
Youth Housing & Transitions
Safety Net Programs
Birthing Hospitals
Shelters
Potential to blend and braid federal Medicaid, TANF, and home-visiting funds
Advocacy Agendas
Oversight
Data
Financing
Community- Based Orgs
Minimal federal claiming of Title IV-E funds
Organizations & Agencies
Quality Improvement
Research & Evaluation
Fatherhood Engagement
Prevention Supports
Current Connection
Policy Influences
High-Impact Opportunity
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CURRENT CONTEXT AND STRENGTHS The establishment of DCYF alone speaks to Washington State’s recognition that collaboration and alignment are critical to preventing child welfare involvement for families. In uniting the three previously separate agencies, DCYF affirmed its commitment to preventing harm to children and youth by focusing on early interventions and addressing root causes. Another collaborative strength in Washington is the shared commitment to racial equity in creating DCYF. Advancing racial equity and eliminating racial disproportionalities are top priorities in DCYF’s five-year plan. Racial equity is further centered in the creation of DCYF’s Office of Racial Equity and Social Justice. The team works with and across the agency and the communities it serves to bring vision, expertise, and a framework to actualize change – ensuring that race and family income no longer predict outcomes for children, youth, and families. With community input, the team developed a Racial Equity Theory of Change (RETOC), emphasizing structural changes to eliminate disparities and prioritize actions that dismantle barriers families face. Further testament to DCYF’s commitment to serving the diverse population of Washington, is DCYF’s establishment of a dedicated Office of Tribal Relations. This office is expanding prevention services, offering culturally relevant programs intended to meet the needs of communities served. For example, they are presently supporting the local implementation of the Icelandic Prevention Model, working with five tribes to adapt this successful community-driven approach to reducing teen substance use. Over the past several years, DCYF has had success in creating several instrumental prevention offerings. The Child Welfare Early Learning Navigators program, Family Connects, Plans of Safe Care, and Strengthening Families Locally are all primary prevention approaches that offer support to enhance family well-being and reduce risk for later child welfare systems contact. These primary programs have been a major DCYF focus — built amid strong collaboration and with the express goal of reducing by half the number of children who experience out-of-home care. Secondary prevention offerings, such as Family Reconciliation Services, have also been created. While not scaled to fully meet the breadth of need nor offered consistently to those who may benefit, these programs are well regarded by families.
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