The Administration for Children and Families’ ‘A Home for Every Child’ initiative gives states a new focus to streamline the Child and Family Services Review (CFSR) with one goal: achieving a 1:1 ratio of children to available foster home. As developments are moving quickly, Impact & Insights will provide regular updates on the initiative.

As of early May, nineteen jurisdictions have opted into the ‘A Home for Every Child’ initiative for a new Child and Family Services Review (CFSR) Program Improvement Plan (PIP). They include Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Washington, D.C. Five states have new performance improvement plans approved by ACF: Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma.

ACF also released the Children’s Bureau’s CFSR dashboard, which makes state-level safety and permanency data publicly available. The data will be updated twice a year — in February and August.

How Youth Villages can help

A Home for Every Child is designed to improve outcomes for children and families by ensuring a safe home is available for every child entering foster care – a 1:1 ratio. This goal can be achieved by increasing the number of foster homes and reducing the need for foster care through prevention and reunification strategies.

Youth Villages’ intensive in-home program, Intercept, is one of seven evidence-based home models recently fast-tracked by ACF for inclusion in state PIP and IV-E prevention plans.

The ‘A Home for Every Child Initiative’ also challenges states to use data in effective ways to improve their child welfare systems and drive positive outcomes. Youth Villages and the Center for State Child Welfare Data have partnered to create Map2Impact which can help states use administrative data to target prevention services to the highest impact areas and drive outcomes. Map2Impact equips leaders with data and evidence to better understand case flow and identify opportunities to use prevention services more effectively, ultimately reducing entries into foster care and supporting progress toward the 1:1 ratio goal.

If you would like to learn more about Intercept, Map2Impact and other ways Youth Villages supports states in designing strategies that can support states with new CFSR-PIP focuses, please contact us at BPPDept@youthvillages.org.

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