Policy & Practice | October 2021

efficiently shift their service provi- sion within child welfare. 2 30 Days to Family®, a program that works at the point of entry into care, is just one program of many that will help the United States effectively move to achieving better health and well-being through prevention, by infusing the philosophies eventually needed in prevention into the current workings of the system. The sub-theme of this article is that programs must be designed for scaling in order to support the sustainability of the child welfare system’s pivot to prevention. But first, in order to fully contextualize this article that focuses on replication and the importance of programs in transi- tion aspects of care reform, we have to share a bit about the program. The 30 Days to Family® program is an intense family search & engagement + kinship navigation program that springs into action the moment a child enters care. More than 70 percent of children served get placed with rela- tives or kin within 30 days of entering care. Perhaps even more important, after being placed with a relative, 81.7 percent of children served remain stable in their placement. 3 At this point, the 30 Days to Family® program is more than 10 years old, and frankly, it works. It works in large part due to some incredibly unique aspects of the model that could very well be implemented into any family search and engagement process to promote best practices: ■ Working with only two families at a time allows the specialist to identify an average of 150 family members in every single case. ■ Contact is made with all family members identified. Every single one. They all have something to con- tribute—regardless of their situation or background. ■ Urgency is key. Services last for 30 days. Period. We get in, we do the work, and we hand off, without sac- rificing thoroughness. Every night a child spends in foster care is a night in crisis. ■ Connections and supports are valued as much as family placement options. Families are used to sup- porting each other naturally, we just have to give them the opportunity.

We write about what we know, so this article uses the 30 Days to Family® program rollout in a U.S. county-administered system as a case example. We use current data, real examples, and heart-based language in the hope of making this come alive. So let’s start with the Families First Prevention Services Act of 2018. Any seismic shift of this nature takes considerable time, resources, inten- tionality, and examination. Obvious, right? But sadly, our systems often cannot account for the logical difficulty and time it takes for systemic change to occur. We’ll start up at the global level and then get down to the ground. For the last few decades, the alterna- tive care reform movements globally have increasingly given focus to the need for positive outcomes but also intentionality around the how and timelines of care reform. 1 Social change theory and human-centered design have begun to take a front seat in conversations. Global researchers have begun to study and compare care reform movements and focus on key learning/guidance for how countries

■ Because the system is tough to navigate, we help families access, map, and sustain every service they need. ■ The tone is set with the family that they, not the professionals, are the experts on their families, and that they are partners of the child welfare system, not clients. Their participa- tion is essential for children to have positive outcomes, both now and in the long term. ■ The program is implemented by a specialized worker for this special- ized work. One person doing all the jobs needed for robust family search & engagement, plus all of the other daily case management duties, isn’t possible. With the Families First Prevention Services Act of 2018, programs like this and others in the bridge space between institutions/foster care and prevention started to get increased attention. This particular program started in St. Louis, MO, at the Foster & Adoptive Care Coalition in 2011. Since 2011, for those children and youth served by the program, more than 75 percent of them achieved placement with family! And at the time of follow up, 82 percent of those children remained living with family! Additionally, an independent study found that children served by the program exited foster care faster as well, thus saving taxpayers more than $10,000 on average for every child served. For youth age 9 and older and those youth with an identified disability, the savings increased to an average of $21,686 and $28,819 respectively! So, state and county administrators started to show interest. In 2019, Ohio’s Attorney General at that time approached Kinnect (a nonprofit organization) with a problem—there weren’t enough foster homes for all the children in foster care in Ohio. He asked Kinnect for guidance on how to recruit more foster homes. Kinnect wisely saw this as an opportunity to influence and redirected the conversation: If the focus shifted to finding family members to care for youth, there would be no need to recruit additional stranger foster homes. The Attorney

Ian Forber-Pratt , MSW, is the Chief Executive Officer of the Institute

for ChildWelfare Innovation in St. Louis, MO, and is the Director of Global Advocacy of the Children’s Emergency Relief International (CERI).

Melanie Moredock is the Chief Operating Officer at the Institute for ChildWelfare Innovation, and is responsible for overseeing the day-

to-day operations of the company, as well as the replication of the groundbreak- ing 30 Days to Family® program.

18

Policy&Practice October 2021