Youth Villages’ New Allies Thriving Families, Safer Children
Working Together to Support Families
Learning What Helps Families Stay Together
Helping more families stay safely together starts with better decisions, earlier support, and stronger alignment across the systems that shape family life.
Lasting change in child welfare happens when communities learn from one another and align their efforts around prevention.
New Allies, developed by Youth Villages, works with child welfare leaders in Mississippi, Kentucky, and Louisiana to support long-term system transformation—helping leaders use data and evidence, strengthen coordination across agencies and courts, and focus improvement efforts on outcomes for children and families. This work strengthens how key parts of the system work together. By using data to guide decisions and deepening collaboration between courts, agencies, and community partners, states are developing approaches that help families earlier and reduce unnecessary time in foster care when separation does occur. Foster America supports this work by helping partners understand how these changes are working in real time. Through interviews and site visits, we gather feedback from parents, youth, frontline workers, and community partners. Paired with timely data analysis, their perspectives highlight what is working, where challenges remain, and where improvements are needed. We translate this learning into clear reports and practical insights so leaders can continue refining their work. Together, this work helps move prevention from aspiration to practice—strengthening the conditions for families to receive support earlier, experience less unnecessary system involvement, and stay connected whenever safely possible.
Thriving Families, Safer Children (TFSC) was created to support such collaboration nationwide. This national effort—led in partnership by the Annie E.
Casey Foundation, Casey Family Programs, the Centers for Disease Control Injury Center, Prevent Child Abuse America, and the U.S. Administration for Children & Families, with the engagement of leaders with lived experience—brings together community leaders, government partners, and family-serving organizations that want to strengthen prevention and reduce unnecessary family separation. The goal is simple: help families have the connections and access to the resources they need without child welfare involvement. Foster America helps keep this work connected at the national level. We support coordination across five partner organizations and 22 local site teams so communities can share ideas and learn from one another rather than working alone. Together, partners have developed shared principles, improved support for local teams, and elevated approaches shaped by parents and young people with lived experience in the child welfare system.
THRIVING FAMILIES, SAFER CHILDREN:
COLLABORATION IN ACTION
22 site teams testing community-driven prevention strategies 5 national partners coordinating learning and technical support Cross-sector coalitions aligning public agencies and community partners Parents and families shaping policy and system redesign
By helping communities share what they are learning, TFSC allows promising ideas to spread beyond a single place. Over the past year, site teams have strengthened cross- sector partnerships, expanded leadership roles for parents and young people with lived experience, and tested community-driven prevention strategies designed to help families access support earlier.
Prevention becomes possible when systems work together to support families earlier.
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