Winners will carry out demonstration projects, lead national centers to assist systems
The U.S. Children’s Bureau has announced the winners of several million dollars in federal grants focused on workforce, early childhood, racial bias and inequity, and other issues late last week.
While the announcement page does not give much information about the grants and their specific purposes, Youth Services Insider was able to dig around the agency’s grant making database to unearth a few details, which we note wherever possible.
Early Childhood-Child Welfare Partnerships
In a nutshell: Eight three-year grants aimed at projects that foster collaboration between child welfare systems and early childhood education services. As The Imprint reported a few years back, there is some research suggesting that a connection to early childhood education (especially Head Start) is correlated with less child welfare involvement. Click here for a story on how one tech-savvy official in Los Angeles created a simple tech pipeline between those two worlds.
Winners:
- Brighton Center, Inc. (Newport, Kentucky) for the Well-Being & Equity in Early Childhood Education Project
- Chapin Hall Center for Children (Chicago)
- Community Action Partnership Sonoma County (Santa Rosa, California) for the Sonoma County Early Childhood-Child Welfare Partnership
- Family Support Services of North Florida, Inc. (Jacksonville) for the Child Welfare Early Education Partnership
- Kansas Department of Education (Topeka) for Kansas Linking Infrastructure for Nurturing Kids
- Washington State Department of Children, Youth, and Families (Olympia) for the agency’s Early Learning Navigators program
- Wyoming Department of Family Services (Cheyenne)
- YMCA of San Diego County (San Diego) for its Link & Learn Project
Racial Bias and Inequity in Child Welfare
In a nutshell: Recipients can receive up to $2.5 million over five years ($500,000 in this fiscal) to develop and test strategies for reducing racial bias and inequity within child welfare systems.
Winners:
- American Bar Association Fund for Justice and Education (Washington, D.C.) for Michigan Stop Over-reporting our People
- Fund for the City of New York, Inc. (New York City) for a Peer Care Initiative operated by
- Kentucky Youth Advocates, Inc. (Louisville) for Community is our Strength: Empowering Black Families and Promoting Child Safety
- Minneapolis American Indian Center (Minneapolis) for the Bright Beginnings Field-Initiated Pilot Project
- The Contingent (Portland, Oregon) for The North Little Rock Thriving Families Initiative in Arkansas.
- FosterClub (Seaside, Oregon) for Authentic Lived Experience Powering Racial Equity
- University of Kansas Center for Research, Inc. (Lawrence) for Kansas Bravely Raising & Activating Voices for Equity
- YMCA of San Diego County (San Diego) for the Family Justice, Liberation, & Healing Project
National Center for Adoption Competent Mental Health Services
In a nutshell: A central grantee tasked with helping child welfare systems build bridges to the mental health community.
Winner:
- Center for Adoption Support and Education (C.A.S.E.), a Maryland-based nonprofit that worked with the feds to develop a free online training for adoptive and foster care caseworkers
National Center for Enhanced Post-Adoption Support
In a nutshell: Helping states develop their ability to provide effective post-permanency support to adoptive and guardianship families, the need for which was highlighted last year in a major investigation by USA Today.
Winner:
- Spaulding for Children, a Michigan-based nonprofit that has already worked with the feds on developing training for parents on the front end of adoptions
Trauma-Interventions for Children and Youth in Foster Care
In a nutshell: Two grantees are getting $3 million over three years to work with foster parents on co-parenting with birth families, enrichment activities and other strategies for providing a healthy environment for traumatized youth.
Winners:
- Gateway, which provides foster parent training and therapeutic foster care in Alabama
- The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a more than century-old New York City provider that operates a child safety training institute
The National Child Welfare Workforce Institute
In a nutshell: A long-running operation of the Children’s Bureau, the institute works with state, local and tribal jurisdictions on recruitment, training and retention of child welfare workers. It is funded at $25 million over a five-year period.
Winner:
- After several five-year stints with the University of Albany as its lead grantee, the North American Council on Adoptable Children in St. Paul, Minnesota, will take over the institute.
Quality Improvement Center on Workforce Analytics
In a nutshell: A data-oriented complement to the workforce institute that will use analytics to inform the policy conversation around recruitment, performance measurement and outcomes.
Winner:
- The University of California, Los Angeles, will be the inaugural grantee for this center, with $1.3 million per year in federal support
National Hotline for Child Safety and Family Well-Being Concerns
In a nutshell: This appears to be a replacement for the National Child Abuse Hotline. While that hotline, operated by Childhelp, makes clear it is not there to receive reports of abuse and neglect, the description of this new hotline seems geared towards prioritizing referrals to local support programs in the community for people who reach out over the phone or on chat with concerns about child safety or well-being.
Winner:
- Parents Anonymous, a national nonprofit that has been around since 1969 and used to draw a mandatory funding line in the federal budget each year. This is the organization’s first grant from the Children’s Bureau since 2010, according to federal grant records
State-Tribal Partnerships
In a nutshell: Five awards of up to $2.5 million in the next five years for collaborations of courts, tribes and child welfare systems to “minimize the disproportionate placement of American Indian and Alaska Native…children away from their families and communities” This work buffers the expectations already set for Indigenous families under the Indian Child Welfare Act, a decades-old law that requires systems to make active efforts to keep Native youth with their families and tribes.
Winners:
- Alaska Federation of Natives, Inc. (Anchorage)
- Judiciary Courts of the State of Minnesota (St. Paul)
- Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services (Lincoln,)
- Oregon Judicial Department (Salem)
- University of North Dakota (Grand Forks)
Tribal Court Improvement Program
In a nutshell: $750,000 over five years for tribal governments to assess and improve the function of tribal courts when it comes to child welfare.
Winners:
- Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (Pablo, Montana)
- Kalispel Indian Community of the Kalispel Reservation (Cusick, Washington)
- Lower Sioux Indian Community in the State of Minnesota (Morton)
- Ponca Tribe of Nebraska (Niobrara)
Tribal Title IV-E Plan Development Grants
In a nutshell: Supporting the cost for tribes to develop a plan to establish their own Title IV-E program, which puts them in a position to deal directly with the federal government on federal child welfare funds instead of working through a state. This option has been available to tribes for 15 years, but only a handful of tribes have completed the process.
Winners:
- None, because no applications were submitted. Youth Services Insider is told credibly that the award — $300,000 over two years — is simply not enough money to hire the necessary person to lead the process and establish all of the data infrastructure that is required