2017-2023
Evidence suggests that fathers play an important role in children's development and that they can serve as a key source of emotional and financial support. In many social services, however, fathers have been historically overlooked. This has been the case in the child welfare system, where data from the Child and Family Service Reviews indicate that fathers and paternal relatives could be better engaged.
The purpose of this project was to apply what we know about the importance of fathers to strengthening father and paternal relative engagement in the child welfare system. Partnering with the Office of Family Assistance (which oversees the Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood discretionary grant program) and the Children’s Bureau, this project aimed to:
- Synthesize what we already know about a) efforts to engage fathers and paternal relatives of children involved in the child welfare system, and b) Continuous Quality Improvement approaches within the child welfare system;
- Map “touch points” within a child welfare case where fathers and/or paternal relatives could be more fully engaged;
- Identify potential strategies and interventions that could be used at the touch points to increase their engagement;
- Select a collaborative Continuous Quality Improvement approach and use it to work intensively with a few sites to implement and test these father and paternal relative engagement strategies and interventions;
- Conduct a pilot study to examine the feasibility and implementation of the Continuous Quality Improvement approach and the engagement strategies and interventions; and
- Conduct an evaluation of the selected continuous learning methodology and the engagement strategies and interventions.
This contract was awarded to Mathematica, with a subcontract to the University of Denver.
Point(s) of contact: Pooja Curtin and Katie Pahigiannis.