| |
Robert Wood Johnson Grant
The Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) is seeking approximately $320,000 to conduct an analysis of the most promising community-based practices for integrated services and supports to children, youth, and their families across the behavioral health, child welfare, and juvenile justice service systems, in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJ). In Phase I, which this request will support, RWJ and CWLA will host three roundtable summit discussions over 18 months, culminating in a series of white papers and action steps to synthesize this knowledge base and develop guidelines for multi-systems culture change. After this initial phase, we intend to pilot our findings in two sites in order to test our analyses and recommendations and widely disseminate our results. (See Phase I and Phase II narratives, below.)
Launching this partnership is one definitive way that CWLA can help RWJ achieve its goal of promoting healthy living and improving well-being among the children and families known to the behavioral health, child welfare, and juvenile justice systems.
As a result of our proposed activities we envision better outcomes for the families we serve through integrated treatment and supports that combine recent advances in the behavioral health, child welfare, and juvenile justice systems. An integrated community-based juvenile justice/substance abuse treatment network model has already emerged as a preferred means of addressing the complex community problems that surround adjudicated youth with behavioral health issues. This model may serve as a prototype for working with young people and families who are known to any of the three systems.
We hope to forge a link between the knowledge from RWJ's Reclaiming Futures Initiative and CWLA's breadth of experience in the child welfare field. This link will allow us to synthesize critical knowledge and disseminate it among key stakeholders and consumers within and across these three service systems. It will lead us to multi-system strategies that foster dynamic change in the design and delivery of integrated behavioral health services for children, youth, and their families. This knowledge base, the participant dialogues at the proposed three summits, and action that follows from the resulting recommendations will produce policy, program, practice, and research agendas to guide our individual and collective next steps in system culture change.
CWLA supports and shares RWJ's intent to reduce the personal, social, and economic harm that results when young people and their families are affected by untreated substance abuse and other behavioral health problems. Our commitment to this effort is fueled by a shared sense of mission and values as we seek to ensure that our country's most vulnerable children and families have the opportunity to become contributing members of society.
 Back to Top  Printer-friendly Page  Contact Us
|
|
