• 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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