Resources Database

This manual examines the roles and responsibilities of child protective services (CPS) workers. It describes the purposes, key decisions and issues of each stage of the CPS process and strategies for casework supervision, training and support.

This is the second in a series of articles regarding the current status of child protection services in the United States and proposals to address its challenges. This paper is on the topic 'Caseworkers Are First Responders. They Deserve the Same Professionalization as Other Essential Personnel.' The article is intended to identify a specific issue, analyze typical or traditional responses to the identified issue, and propose fundamental and substantially new alternatives to addressing the issue faced by child protective agencies.

This practice brief focuses on addressing secondary traumatic stress experienced by child welfare staff, easing children’s transitions into foster care and working with parents who have been impacted by trauma. This brief is intended for child welfare providers and other stakeholders seeking to develop trauma-informed practice.

This manual serves as a toolkit of useful PM&E techniques for improving the performance and impact of community-based interventions, such as those involving the most vulnerable children, home-based care and gender-based violence. The manual includes a five-step PM&E programme path and six community group tools.

Despite the call to enhance the resilience of CPSWs, to date, only five research studies have explored resilience processes in CPSWs. In this article, authors present findings that describe resilience-enhancing practices in the lives of 15 South African CPSWs who were considered resilient.

This report highlights needs for strengthening transitions in and out of foster care, and the importance of respectful and responsive relationships between children, foster parents, families and social workers. The report also makes recommendations for greater support to foster families by increasing capacity of social service providers.

The study has identified key findings and 23 useful recommendations for short-term implementation (up to 2018), medium-term implementation (up to 2023), and long-term implementation (after 2023). Recommendations include increasing capacity of the social service workforce and increasing collaboration across sectors as well as effective legislation and policies to protect children.

Well-supported para-professionals, including CHWs and other home visitors, can be effective partners in addressing health inequities, but training, skills and functions should be clarified and training aligned.

The Minimum Standards (MSCS) have been developed to guide the implementation of the EAC Child Policy (2016). The role of the MSCS is to ensure a coordinated approach to service delivery, in particular at the community level, for all children and young people to strengthen their resilience and support their growth, development, and protection. The MSCS highlights the need to ensure cross-sectoral collaboration between key service providers for children and young people, particularly between health, education, social welfare, and justice to ensure all children’s needs are holistically met.

The Deinstitutionalization of Orphans and Other Vulnerable Children in Uganda (DOVCU) project that was funded by USAID, lasted 42 months (July 2014-December 2017). This is a final report of the project's successes. Overall, compared to the baseline, stakeholders in the district government, community structures and also beneficiaries (families) seem to have changed their ideas around child care institutions, their role, and the importance of children growing up in family care. The words “mind-set change” came up many times in interviews and discussions.

This Statement of Ethical Principles is designed to facilitate social workers' aspirations towards the highest possible standards of ethical practice, through processes of constant debate, self-reflection, willingness to deal with ambiguities, and to engage in ethically acceptable processes of decision-making to achieve ethical outcomes. Each of the principles in this Statement must be read in relation to each other and not separately. This Statement makes an explicit commitment to value the people with whom social workers engage.

The purpose of this guide and its companion tools is to offer a sustainable approach that is community-led. Community-led approaches can take many forms, but all of them feature community power, dialogue, and decision-making, including by children. Community-led approaches generate high levels of community ownership, enable stronger prevention and sustainability, and decrease dependency on NGOs and externally-led child protection. Ultimately, child protection requires an appropriate mix of top-down and more grassroots driven, bottom-up approaches.

This framework aims to provide clear and consistent policy and practice to support the engagement of children in making informed decisions about HIV-related prevention, testing, care, social support and treatment.

In many ways, child welfare social workers in Canada mirror the simultaneous and complex relationship between emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction discussed in the literature. The findings also suggest that job satisfaction and perceived support may be key to counter-balancing vicarious trauma, burn out and post-traumatic stress.

This study brief explores the self-care practices of child welfare workers in one southeastern US state. Results reveal that child welfare workers only engage in self-care at moderate levels.

Children involved in the child welfare system may sometimes require clinical care from mental health professionals. The child welfare and mental health professionals working with these children and their families may not always have opportunities to collaborate despite both seeking to improve outcomes.

There is no shortage of anecdotal evidence about the negative impacts that staff turnover can have on children, families, and other staff in agencies that provide Wraparound care coordination. The cost to replace staff is also high. This report highlights findings from a study toward determining strategies to reduce turnover, increase job satisfaction and ultimately improve care.

This issue in Humanitarian Practice Network includes several articles that highlight opportunities for integrating MHPSS programming in humanitarian response, ways to overcome the challenges associated with introducing multi-sectoral interventions into existing systems, research and operational experience, how academics and practitioners can partner effectively to produce actionable evidence in humanitarian settings, and the case for scaling up MHPSS interventions to reach more people at lower cost.

This brief provides specific steps for social workers and social service agencies to take for reintegration and repatriation preparation.