Publications - Child Welfare

What child support agencies share in common with child welfare agencies is children. Not simply children in the abstract, but often the very same children from the very same families — very often, poor families. When child support and child welfare operate entirely independently, the end result can be poorer outcomes for families. Vital information known to one agency may be missing at another. Absent parents who might be a resource for a child may not be located. Parents with children in foster care may receive child support in error and face the prospect of making repayments. Or, child support may never be established even though it would help the family to reunify and be self-sufficient.

The Colorado Rural Collaborative for Homeless Youth was established in 2008 to collectively address the unique needs of rural runaway and homeless youth and the challenges geography poses for them to receive support and services. Namely, this means connecting Colorado’s network of Runaway/Homeless Youth and Child Welfare providers in order to serve youth in rural Read More

A Coach-Like Case Management Program for Youth and Young Adults in Foster Care: Preventing homelessness among young people who have been involved in the child welfare system remains an urgent issue for child welfare policymakers and practitioners. Housing stability is essential for achieving self-sufficiency and promotes health and well-being, particularly during the transition to adulthood. Read More

The Children’s Bureau, within the Administration for Children and Families (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), is funding a multi-phase grant program to build the evidence base on what works to prevent homelessness among youth and young adults who have been involved in the child welfare system. This program is called Youth At-Risk of Read More

The Colorado Pathways to Success Program is a multi-phased program funded by the Children’s Bureau with the aim of developing new initiatives aimed at preventing youth homelessness among current and former foster care youth aged 14-21. This report outlines the key intervention components of the model and reviews the evaluation, lessons learned, and preliminary outcomes Read More

In this brief, local evaluators working with two Youth at Risk of Homeless grantees, Alameda County, California, and the Colorado Department of Human Services, describe how their teams used continuous quality improvement (CQI) to learn from the initial implementation of their model interventions and refine them.

This research brief provides an overview of coaching behavior and in-depth examples of the practice and impacts of coach-like engagement in working with at-risk youth.

In 2013, Colorado’s Department of Human Services (CDHS), Division of Child Welfare (DCW) was chosen as one of eighteen grantees to receive a planning grant (Phase I) from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau under their Youth-At-Risk-of-Homelessness (YARH) demonstration projects. Since then, Colorado was selected as one of six grantee sites Read More

The child support and child welfare project was undertaken to improve collaboration between sister agencies in multiple jurisdictions. The Center for Policy Research of Denver, Colo., with grant funding from the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, conducted two meetings in Washington, D.C., in 2006 and 2007 to bring together top-level managers and other key representatives of child welfare and child support Read More

This document draws on data from several different sources to explore the experiences of Louisiana foster parents. The primary goal is to identify areas in which foster parents need additional training and support. A brief demographic profile of the foster parents who were interviewed or surveyed is included, as is a brief overview of their experiences as foster parents. This Read More