Evident Change can support your agency’s success with A Home for Every Child in a variety of ways.
As the federal Administration for Children and Families’ signature initiative, A Home for Every Child aims to safely decrease the number of children entering foster care and increase the number of foster homes. The initiative is built around a measurable ratio, monthly reporting, public scorecards, and state improvement strategies. Evident Change provides several services that support agencies’ efforts to create and measure change in pursuit of a 1:1 ratio.
For agencies participating in A Home for Every Child, establishing how to measure progress and what you’ll use to measure it is a critical piece of the puzzle. Evident Change offers data monitoring and reporting, research and evaluation, and continuous quality improvement (CQI) strategies to create an integrated evidence-to-action approach.
- SafeMeasures®, our secure data monitoring and reporting service, has new, customized data reports for A Home for Every Child. Lead and chaser measures draw on data from your CCWIS or SACWIS as well as other data sources, creating useful metrics and notifications for staff and automated data exports for easy federal reporting.
- Research and evaluation turn activity into understanding, showing agencies not just whether the ratio is moving but why. Research surfaces the gaps and needs behind the numbers statewide, including the difference between licensed capacity and homes that are truly ready for the children who need them.
- CQI: Integrated CQI turns that understanding into durable change, giving agencies a disciplined way to test what works, watch how it lands, and adjust as needed, so success gains momentum and continues to move in the right direction.
PRACTICE AND POLICY CHANGE FOR SAFE REDUCTIONS IN CARE
Evident Change also offers tools and training to improve agency practices and policies to support the goals of A Home for Every Child. Reducing the number of children in care becomes attainable and sustainable based on longer-term attention to decision making, family engagement, and efficient targeting of resources. Our offerings in these areas include the following.
Decision-support tools: Structured Decision Making® (SDM) tools can help ensure that only necessary removals occur, allowing systems to preserve foster care placements for children who need them.
Social work practice model: Safety-Organized Practice can help prevent unnecessary removals by strengthening family and child engagement practices. Workers gain skills to build better trust with families and their supports, which enables more rigorous and balanced information gathering. This in turn can increase assessment accuracy and help improve safety planning to prevent unnecessary removals, while also supporting timely reunifications or alternative permanency outcomes.
Team Decision Making® (TDM™) model: The TDM™ meeting model can help reduce the number of children who go into care, leaving beds for those who truly need them. TDM meetings bring together the important people in a child’s life to discuss safety planning and support networks. Having the right people at the table means that decisions to remove or reunify are understood and shared across those in a child’s life, enabling all to play a more effective role in safety and permanency.
Community Response Guide: The Community Response Guide helps mandated reporters make more accurate reporting decisions by clarifying when child protection involvement is needed and when children and families may be better served through community supports. By helping families access services earlier, the guide supports prevention efforts, helps safely reduce unnecessary entries to foster care, and keeps families together whenever possible. This approach also helps ensure that that foster and kinship homes remain available for children who truly need out-of-home care.
We look forward to talking with you about how we can help you meet your goals for A Home for Every Child. Share your information below to receive outreach on your needs and hear about new developments from Evident Change to support A Home for Every Child.
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