Resource Library

On May 13, 2025, the Children's Bureau hosted a webinar introducing the new AFCARS dashboard. The webinar provided an overview of updated elements, demonstrated the dashboard's key capabilities, and offered critical guidance on how to interpret reported statistics.

This document provides a summary of Child Welfare Outcomes 2021 Report to Congress.

This Report to Congress provides information on the performance of states on seven national outcome categories and also includes data on contextual factors and findings of analyses conducted across states.

This report presents national data about child abuse and neglect known to child protective services agencies in the United States during federal fiscal year 2022.

This report to Congress provides national totals of planned spending by service category for the Stephanie Tubbs Jones Child Welfare Services program and planned and actual spending by service category for the Promoting Safe and Stable Families program.

This Information Memoranda (IM) provides State, Tribal and Territorial title IV-E agencies an updated Title IV-E Plan Pre-Print for the Foster Care Assistance, Adoption Assistance, Guardianship Assistance and Kinship Navigator programs.

The purpose of this Information Memorandum (IM) is to inform title IV-E agencies that a final rule was published amending the AFCARS regulations to require state title IV-E agencies to collect and report data elements related to the procedural protections of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA). This final rule was published in the Federal Register on December 5, 2024 (89 FR 96569).

On November 22nd, 2024 the Children's Bureau released a Dear Colleague Letter pertaining to the recent guidance issued by the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services that emphasized the importance of the new CMS guidance, specifically for child welfare leaders seeking to address health care needs, both as a strategy for preventing entry into the child welfare system, as well as for addressing the needs of children and youth in foster care.

This document lists the recipients of the 2024 Adoption Excellence Awards and provides a brief description of each recipient’s work.