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Community Action and Child Welfare System Collaboration Assessment Survey

Purpose

A Home for Every Child is a new initiative, through the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), that is focused on decreasing the number of children entering foster care while also increasing the number of available foster homes.

Community Action plays an important role in strengthening families and stabilizing communities. As child welfare systems continue to focus on prevention and expanding safe, supportive foster and kinship homes, partnerships with Community Action Agencies (CAAs) are increasingly critical.

This survey is designed to better understand how CAAs are currently working with child welfare agencies: what is working well, where collaboration is meaningfully preventing child welfare system engagement, and how CAAs are helping expand and/or stabilize foster and kinship homes.

Your perspective will help identify strengths across the network, highlight promising practices, and inform potential partnership strategies. The survey should take approximately 8–10 minutes to complete, and responses will be shared in summary form only.

To learn more about A Home for Every Child and for more resources on child welfare systems, click here.

For the purposes of this survey:
  • Child Welfare refers to the public systems designed to promote the well-being of children by ensuring safety, achieving permanency, and strengthening families. (Source: HHS.gov).
  • Prevention and/or Family Support Services refer to strategies that are designed to reduce risk factors and build positive family engagement that is vital to help families thrive and prevent child abuse and neglect and family separation (Source: Child Welfare Information Gateway).
  • Foster Care refers to a component of the child welfare system where children who cannot safely remain at home because of abuse, neglect, or other serious family challenges are placed temporarily in licensed family-based settings or approved caregiver homes (Source: Child Welfare Information Gateway).
  • Kinship Care refers to care provided to a child in custody by a relative caregiver or fictive kin (someone close with the family) (Source: Child Welfare Information Gateway).
Thank you for taking the time to share your experience and expertise!