Program Outcome: Safety

Public housing agencies (PHAs) administer FUP in partnership with Public Child Welfare Agencies (PCWAs). The PCWA initially determines if the family or youth meets the FUP eligibility requirements, certifies that the family or youth is eligible, and refers those families and youth to the PHA. Once the PCWA makes the referral, the PHA places the FUP applicant on its Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) waiting list and determines whether the family meets HCV program eligibility requirements, including income eligibility. The PHA conducts all other processes relating to voucher issuance and administration. The program does not require PCWAs to provide supportive services for families; however, PCWAs may make them available to families as well. Examples of the skills targeted by these supportive services can include money management skills, job preparation, educational counseling, and proper nutrition and meal preparation.

Nurturing Skills™ for Families (NSF) is a model of the Nurturing Parenting® Programs designed to prevent child abuse and neglect by addressing key areas that contribute to a safe and healthy family environment. The program aims to promote positive family practices, enhance parental knowledge and skills, improve communication and problem-solving abilities, build emotional resilience, strengthen family bonds, address risk factors, foster community support, and encourage accountability.

This flexible program is tailored to meet the needs of families with children ranging from prenatal to 19 years old. The Lesson Guide for Parents contains over 80 individual lessons presented across 16 competency areas, with core competency lessons forming the program's basic structure. Additional lessons allow parent educators to customize the program to suit the specific needs of each group or family.

Although the program representatives state that the model can be used with all families, it is only rated in the Interventions for Abusive Behaviors on research with families involved in the child welfare system.

Reminiscing and Emotion Training (RET) is a brief, relational intervention designed to improve the caregiver-child relationship, improve caregiver emotion socialization, and to facilitate healthy development among children (aged 3-6 years) who have experienced, or who are at risk for, child maltreatment. Relational interventions aim to address the adverse consequences of maltreatment and prevent future maltreatment through the enhancement of the caregiver-child relationship. RET is designed to shift parents of young children towards sensitive parenting which emphasizes verbal interactions, including supportive guidance during discussion of children’s emotions.

RET includes 6 home visiting sessions for parents and children, teaches parents skills and strategies for improving parent-child communication and reminiscing, and includes caregiver-child activities to support emotion socialization. Features include videorecording of caregiver–child reminiscing to practice skills and enhance caregiver insight, focusing on positive feedback to highlight positive moments and build caregiver competence and motivation in emotion socialization, and introducing simple emotion-focused parent–child activities.

Indiana Family Preservation Services (INFPS) are services designed to work with families who have had a substantiated incident of abuse and/or neglect, where the department of child services/child welfare services believes the child(ren) can remain in the home with their caregiver(s) with the introduction of appropriate services to the family. These services may also be utilized in the absence of a substantiated abuse or neglect allegation if there is an active in-home case. This service shall be for the entire family.

SAFE@Home is a community-based in-home safety management and parenting assistance service for families with unsafe children, who need protection. The program is designed to establish collaborative partnerships between public child welfare and community family service agencies for providing family-centered in-home service. Service delivery is intended to ensure children are kept safe in the least intrusive way possible, while also supporting a public child welfare caseworker’s ability to help caregivers make behavioral changes. SAFE@Home safety managers, employed by community family service agencies, assist in developing and managing in-home safety plans. Additionally, safety managers take a lead role in providing direct, often intensive, in-home safety services for parents/ caregivers and children. In-home safety services are individualized to sufficiently manage safety threats and provide basic parenting assistance, so children can remain home during the time that families are receiving ongoing public child welfare intervention.

Play it Safe!® Child Abuse Prevention Program – 3rd-5th Grade is a child abuse prevention program designed to be presented to one classroom at a time. There are separate curricula for 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade.

Note: Play it Safe! has grade-level curriculum for Pre-K through 2nd grade students and 6th grade through high school students, but the CEBC has not reviewed and rated the curriculum for those grades.

Early Start is a home visitation program that originated in New Zealand. It focuses on providing tamariki (children) in whānau (families) facing multiple disadvantages with supports and practical assistance.

The key features of the program are:

• Families are enrolled when their child is under one year, and ideally during the antenatal period. The primary focus is the child, providing family support and education to ‘nurture the baby early’ and encourage improvements in lifelong experiences.
• Families receive a comprehensive program which is provided by trained Family Support Workers with qualifications in Nursing, Social Work, Education, Early Childhood Education, or an allied profession.
• The service consists of a modular program of home visiting which may last up to five years.
• The frequency of home visiting varies according to family need and ranges from Level 1 home visiting (weekly) to Level 4 home visiting (one visit every four months).
• The aims of the program are to address a range of issues relating to the well-being of the enrolled child and their family.

MST-BSF is an ecologically based treatment model for families involved with child welfare services due to physical abuse and/or neglect plus parental substance misuse. MST-BSF is designed to provide all families with intensive safety planning, Reinforcement-Based Treatment for adult substance misuse, a relapse prevention group, and clarification of the abuse or neglect. On an individualized, as-needed basis, children and adults receive treatment for clinical challenges such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), parenting, and family communication. To assure model fidelity, an array of quality assurance procedures is integrated into the model. The model is operated through a team consisting of a supervisor, a family resource specialist who focuses on basic needs, and three therapists that carry a caseload maximum of 4 families. Services are provided a minimum of 3 times per week plus there are on-call services for crises available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. A psychiatrist is available 10-20% time. A close working relationship with child welfare services is important.

The Kinship Navigator (CHN-KN) Children’s Home Network provides supportive services to any relative or nonrelative raising a child on a full-time basis when a parent is unable or unwilling to provide care. Nonrelative refers to someone unrelated who has a significant or family-like relationship to the child. This program provides services to families regardless of their status with the child welfare system, therefore serving informal and formal families. CHN-KN provides a centralized intake line, comprehensive assessments, family conferencing, and navigation services that include securing concrete needs, enrollment in public assistance, linkage to key community resources, development of informal and formal supports, service and crisis planning, support groups, and follow-up contacts at 3-month intervals postcompletion of the program.

The TASC's Family Recovery & Reunification Program (FRRP) seeks to improve the outcomes of substance abusing parents compared to those parents receiving traditional alcohol and other drug abuse (AODA) services from child welfare workers through the assignment of a Recovery Coach. Recovery Coaches are responsible for providing individualized case management services and aggressive outreach supportive of client substance abuse recovery and reunification with their children when appropriate.