Policy and Practice | June 2021

Most important, we keep letting themknow that we’rewilling to try things, evaluate, and change course.We have never expected to get it right the first time.We do a lot of phased approaches and pilots as away of building buy-in, showing a return on our investment, anddemonstrating that we’rewilling tomake changes if something doesn’t work.

initiatives like Help Me Grow, Parents as Teachers, and Healthy Families America. And our Department of Youth Services has some of the evidence- based practices we’re leaning into for our Family First work. Tierney: Imagine it’s 10 years from now. Everything has gone perfectly with your organization. What does child welfare in Ohio look like? Wente: I want to see our network grow, which sounds somewhat odd because you usually want your caseload to shrink. Let me clarify: I want my custody caseload to shrink. But I want the families I’m engaging with to grow—and I want our cross-collabora- tion efforts to be robust at the state level. I want the community networks to be thriving, with families proactively reaching out for whatever supports they need. Families know they can come to their local community hub to get help with work, health care, child care, or behavioral health services. When families get engaged sooner, we can significantly reduce the number that reach the point where we’re taking custody.

disabilities. We have pulled those partnerships into our children’s service space. They’ve pulled us into theirs. And that has yielded some really good outcomes from the stand- point of prevention. We’ve learned that we don’t have to be the experts at everything. Our state agency partners have multi-systemic therapy and family functional therapy and great ways to set that up. Our Department of Health also has great

been involved earlier on, I would have seen the connections and the fact that public assistance is a pivotal, almost preventive service for child services. So, one of my personal epiphanies has been to eliminate those silos in my own mind. Breaking down silos across agencies has been another lesson. We’ve leaned into our sister agencies, including Medicaid, mental health and addic- tion services, and developmental

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June 2021 Policy&Practice