child care - Digital Library Collections

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HHS is funding such demonstration projects in
Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and
Oregon. The Protect Ohio project, for example,
which will involve no more than 20 counties initially,
uses funds currently invested in foster care
to develop community-based services to keep children
safer and help families resolve problems. As
foster care costs decline because of the availability
ofmore preventive services, counties will be able to
reinvest these dollars in other child welfare services.
The project will be evaluated on the basis of
improved outcomes for children and families.
Although privatization and managed care in
child welfare are appealing in theory, too often they
are proposed simply as part of a larger plan to
contain costs. The resources to achieve outcomes
and measure progress are not provided. The challenge
in any outcome-based system is to defme the
desired outcomes, find ways to achieve them, and
establish ways to measure and track progress consistently
across agencies, across cases within the
same agency, and over time. In Kansas, for example,
the lack ofa comprehensive data system is one
of the barriers to effective privatization of its
activities.
An Exciting Local Initiative
Mer a full year of planning, Louisville, Kentucky,
launched its Community Partnership for
rotecting Children in 1997. With funding
from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and
technical assistance from the Washington, D.C.­
based Center for the Study of Social Policy, Louisville
is starting to shift responsibility for child protection
from a single public agency to a partnership
ofagencies, community centers, schools, neighborhoods,
and families.
Kentucky and Louisville had already experimented
with many reforms in the areas of family
support, child welfare, and children's mental
health services. In the early 1990s a statewide
education initiative required the creation of family
resource centers for elementary school students
and youth service centers for high school
students in most school districts. The Jefferson
County Family Court sought creative new ways to
mediate cases and secure appropriate services for
families in need. At the same time, Louisville
developed the concept of "A Neighborhood
Place," where services for children and families
would be centralized in one place in some of the
city's most vulnerable neighborhoods. Managed
with help from parents and community members,
these sites bring together staff and services from
various public agencies, including health and human
services, mental health, social insurance,
child protection, employment, education, and law
enforcement.
In September 1995 Kentucky Youth Advocates
(KYA) chronicled the child protection crisis in a
report titled Above and Beyond. It described hundreds
of calls to a statewide hotline KYA set up
after the death ofa child under agency supervision,
and made a strong case that child welfare workers
were overburdened and unable to keep children
safe. Funds for better training and more staff resulted,
and publicity about the hotline fmdings also
helped mobilize the community to act.
The Community Partnership for Protecting
Children grew both out of Louisville's earlier reform
efforts and out of the community's desire to
take charge and find better ways to safeguard children
from abuse and neglect. The project exemplifies
the importance of commitment, communication,
and time in building true partnerships to
protect children. Its activities have focused on
Neighborhood Place Ujima, housed in a multiservice
center.
A major challenge during the planning stage
was overcoming the mistrust among people in the
neighborhood, the child protective services agency,
and other government agencies. Trust developed as
participants created a common vision and agenda
and clarified their respective roles, responsibilities,
and authority. Participants now see the partnership
as "a covenant ofarms linking everyone together in
the belief that childhood is a sacred time and that
safety is the promise our community makes to its
children and families." The planning phase also
involved much struggle to set objectives for partnership
activity and benchmarks for evaluating pro-
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