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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