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Keeping Families Together and Safe: The Child Protection-Housing Connection
Each year thousands of children in America are separated from their families due to critical housing needs. Families with children are among the fastest growing segments of our nation's homeless population. Families with inadequate housing conditions such as overcrowding, disrepair, or housing instability face enormous challenges in adequately caring for and protecting their children. These families need concrete and added support to provide for the care and protection of their children. Child protection workers are in the unique position of offering housing assistance that could prevent children from experiencing homelessness and its residual adverse effects. Homeless services workers are in a unique position to identify families who are at risk of abuse and neglect or are suspected of maltreating their children.
The Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) seeks to increase the number of families who are able to stay together by developing and implementing an education and training initiative for child protection workers and housing professionals.
CWLA, with support from the Freddie Mac Foundation, launched the first phase of cross-systems collaboration between child protection and housing frontline professionals in order to lead and facilitate the development of a primer, corresponding curriculum, and pilot cross-system training, with the following four objectives:
- Increase understanding of one another's roles, responsibilities, and resources, and of the respective agencies and systems in which they perform their work.
- Provide a foundation for the creation and establishment of both formal and informal linkages and partnerships across these two service systems.
- Improve both systems' capacity to assess and identify the housing needs of families who come to the attention of the child protection agency.
- Develop both systems' capacity to address the housing needs of families who come to the attention of the child protection agency, whenever resources are available.
With additional support from the Freddie Mac Foundation and the Daniels Fund, CWLA will advance the work accomplished in phase one. During phase two, CWLA intends to achieve the following objectives:
- Conduct and evaluate 2 additional pilots of the Frontline workers' curriculum.
- Refine and finalize the Frontline workers' curriculum
- Develop Supervisors' curriculum
- Develop an Administrators' Guide
- Conduct and evaluate integrated field test using all three project components - frontline workers and supervisors curricula and the administrators guide.
For more information about this project contact Charlene Ingram at cincgram@cwla.org or 856/566-9454.
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