Policy and Practice | August 2022

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unrestricted funding to help families involved in child welfare keep their kids at home, but it is time limited to four months. We started with that and found some ancillary support. Counties were looking for a longer time window to intervene in families where housing is an issue. Since housing is local, we are asking our counties to decide how the program should look in their areas. Tierney: Parents who have worked hard for secure housing might look at this and say, “So, you come into child welfare and get an apart ment?” How are you handling that potential issue? Henderson: For now, we are just setting it aside. We had already been working on a housing program for adolescents aging out of foster care. We have been seeing how stable housing helps them shift from “Where am I sleeping tonight?” to “What does my future look like?” Often there is concern as paying a rental deposit in order to prevent an individual from becoming homeless or by providing a juvenile, who has no record, with an alternative to jail, preventing them from a lifetime in the system. Prevention services and activities save lives. Health and human services organizations across the country provide a vast array of outstanding programs and services to assist families toward health and well-being, including a variety of prevention services. Federal reimbursement for mental health services, substance use treatment, and in-home parenting skill training is now available in order to prevent children from entering foster care. There are programs to assist with utility bills in order to prevent homelessness, poten tial illness, or further consequences. There are also programs that provide the ability to coordinate various services for individuals to support better outcomes. These examples provide

that if you start paying someone’s rent, they will be unhoused again as soon as you stop. That is not what is happening with these former foster youth. Imagine how the same could be true of families. If we could remove housing stress for 12 or 18 months, what might happen to these families? How might they tap into some of their other pro tective factors and resiliency they are currently spending on “Where are we sleeping tonight?” Henderson: Each county is tailoring the program to meet their community’s needs. While this makes it a bit more difficult to have a consistent measure across the program, it provides us with a unique opportunity to have a more diverse experiment and learn from each other in a shorter amount of time. Some of the things we will be moni toring while families are enrolled in Tierney: How will you measure results?

the program include whether the child(ren) remained in the home, additional child welfare and/or social services involvement, family and child well-being, including stress and mental health, employment, and more. If Family Keys is a success and we want to scale, it would require signifi cant funding. But if the child welfare system routinely pays thousands of dollars per month per child to stay in a group home, why shouldn’t we be equally willing to invest $1,000 a month to help an entire family be safer, more secure, and more stable together? MollyTierney is the Child Welfare Industry Lead in Accenture’s North America Public Sector Practice. Wendy Henderson is the Administrator for Division of Safety and Permanence within the State of Wisconsin’s Department of Children and Families. with energy costs where we would provide regular, monthly allowances to lessen the financial strain of those services. But with the impact of the pandemic, it was clear that many more people would need help.” The DCA oversees programs that help households catch up on past due utilities. To meet pandemic-related increases, the department launched a self-service application portal and approval process. In the first 10 months, the DCA dispersed more than $127M in relief funds to those in need. If families need assistance while applying, they can turn to a call center and virtual agent for support. The virtual agent handles an average of 6,200 calls per month, saving more than 800 hours. These features free DCA staff to focus on more critical tasks and assist families faster. “The analytics that IBMmakes avail able to us have been critical in terms of business and executive management,”

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more detail about programs that are driving better health and well-being through prevention services.

Winter is Cold. Government Aid Shouldn’t Be: Keeping the Lights on forThose in Need A power shut-off notice is never a good thing. But in the heart of winter as temperatures hover below freezing, such a notice is downright frightening. In New Jersey, the Department of Community Affairs (DCA) works to help citizens who have fallen behind on their energy payments to keep the lights on and the heat running. “Heating is important when it gets cold around here,” notes John Harrison, Director of Information Technology for the DCA. “And elec tricity is important overall, so we already had a standard program in place to help families with low-income

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