MFF looks back at Child Welfare Accomplishments

In recent years, child welfare has taken on a new goal: keep families together. Research has shown children have the best outcomes when they stay with family—if not their parents, then someone they have a significant relationship with.

This goal was codified with the passing of the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) in 2018, which changed the way child welfare funding is distributed. Organizations and agencies now must prove their efficacy through data to become Title IV-E recognized and receive funding, which means they now need to invest in research.

A believer in the power of data, MFF became involved with child welfare around this time. “Data and evaluation are universal tools,” MFF Strategic Change and Evaluation Specialist Elisabeth Wilson explained. “No matter how you're running your system, no matter what policies, or even what leadership structures you're under, information is universal.”

MFF funded the National Council for Adoption’s (NCA) first research initiative now called “Profiles In Adoption,” which examines the experiences of adoptees and their birth and adoptive families. It was an incredibly successful project that continues to this day.

Motivated by its success, MFF launched the Child Welfare Initiative in 2021, which gave $1.4 million in funding over three years toward child welfare. “We decided to start building research and evaluation teams within child welfare agencies who were ready for that type of team,” Wilson said. For those that were not ready for a full-time team, MFF developed ways to get these agencies interested in data and give them the tools needed to access and contribute to data.

MFF dedicated $1.1 million to the Colorado Implementation Science Unit (CISU) within the Colorado Department of Human Services, which funded four data professionals for three years. “The idea was, we will give you a three-year runway to see what full-time data and evaluation teams can do, which will allow them to start advocating to state government to fully fund those positions long-term,” Wilson said.

The impact of this funding has been huge. Since 2021, CISU has worked with over 50 nonprofits and has supported the implementation and expansion of the Colorado Kinnected Navigator Program, which places children who cannot stay in their own homes with caregivers they have an existing, significant relationship with, like a godparent or close relative. In the last year, the program hit a new milestone: 50 percent of foster care youth have had their initial placement with kinship caregivers.

“The program is now Title IV E recognized, so that has expanded federal funding to the state of Colorado. And now, that team is helping to implement it beyond just the city limits,” says Wilson. Approaching its last year of funding, CISU is on track to continue long-term: “They have integrated beautifully. They are a key component of the child welfare initiatives in Colorado and have been a huge point of pride and joy for the state.”

The Child Welfare Initiative has also opened access to practitioner-led research. “For years, we have had incredible teams outside of actual child welfare practitioners doing research, and they have found a lot of trends and done a lot of great work,” Wilson explained. But with high-cost paywalls and other barriers to research, this information has remained out of reach for the organizations that need this data most.

“We have taken that incredible research and put in practitioners who are on the ground working every day with direct services to participate in and they have come up with new questions, new data, and are actually driving knowledge from a community-first perspective,” Wilson said. In the case of NCA, they released a survey to adoption organizations to identify what data the organizations need to better their work, like identifying the best resources to support interracial adoption, which the NCA then delivered insights on.

Another major accomplishment in child welfare has been the passing of SB08 in Colorado, which gives tuition-free public higher education to foster youths and creates foster care student navigators to help guide students through the application process. “Less than 10 percent of individuals with foster care experience go on to college,” Wilson said. “So that is huge.” MFF’s longtime partner Mile High United Way spearheaded the lobbying efforts that ultimately helped pass this bill.

Working directly with smaller organizations like NCA or Kids Voice of Indiana (KVI), MFF has been able to take a ground-up approach to child welfare in addition to the top-down approach seen in CISU. Supporting small teams working on an individual, family-by-family level, MFF’s success is obvious in participant feedback. In the case of KVI, each participant said, “‘I learned so much about my team that I didn't know it,’” Wilson recounted. “’I made better connections to the people around me that I now know where to go and who to talk to. I feel closer to the people that I work with.’”