Resources Database

The growing need for kinship families and related support services has led many States to launch kinship awareness campaigns to recognize the tremendous contribution these caregivers make, the challenges they face, and the help they need. This bulletin highlights supports and services for kinship caregivers, training for caseworkers and caregivers, and examples of successful kinship care programs.

Although caseworkers play a key role in ensuring that the special needs of these children are met, little is known regarding caseworkers’ knowledge about, exposure to, and comfort with people with developmental disabilities. In this exploratory study, local county caseworkers were asked to self-rate their knowledge, exposure, and comfort levels. Findings indicated caseworker agreement regarding the relevance of having knowledge and training about this population within the child welfare system.

This final project report highlights some of the lessons and achievements in Moldova toward helping government improve national child care and child protection policies and legislation and build capacity through training to support the transition of the child care system towards family- and community-based services. The project also worked with district-specific social service systems built on family support, alternative care, and child protection; capacity building/training; inclusive education; financial management; child participation; and deinstitutionalization.

This short human rights in action article take a critical approach to the translation of alternative care and child protection policies to practice and highlights risks involved with haste, outcomes measured in numbers and unrealistic timeframes, and rapidly transforming practice with nascent investment in a country’s capacity to assess and respond to the real needs of children and families within their communities.

During a workshop proceeding, speakers examined the rationale for integration of health care and social services for people with serious illness, explored examples of innovative partnerships and collaborations that provide integrated services, and discussed the potential policy challenges and opportunities for integrating health care and social services. The workshop also featured a session devoted to the unique role and needs of family caregivers, who often serve as a bridge between the health care and social services sectors.

This bulletin describes the intersection of child welfare and early invention services, provides an overview of the Part C process, and outlines the challenges and strategies for implementing Part C provisions.

A series of three tools has been developed to support groups working to transition from residential care settings to family-based care, including an online training, a guidance manual and toolkit.

This report shows how cash benefits are proven to have significant, wide-ranging, positive impacts on children’s lives, but that they must be part of integrated social protection and broader social policy programming that includes childcare and social services as well.

This publication outlines five clear steps that child welfare agency leaders can take to build and maintain a strong, stable frontline workforce.

This compendium includes various tools, visuals, tips and suggestions for how they can be applied through clinical health care, family case management and home visits, early childhood education and parenting programs.

This technical guidance document aims to ensure that all survivors/victims of GBV (Domestic and sexual violence) receive a prompt and comprehensive response from service providers in terms of medical, psychosocial and legal support; and also considering the current reporting mechanisms. This resource includes details on ensuring confidentiality from service providers and holistic care.

The document highlights the importance of strengthening protective factors, including the provision of quality social services, to address child neglect.

This document specifies and details competencies with performance indicators necessary to successfully manage human services organizations through the following four domains: Executive Leadership, Resource Management, Strategic Management and Community Collaboration. These domains and the competencies therein are intended to be a framework for describing the skills necessary for the successful management of both public and private human service organizations.

This resource related to community health worker remuneration, training and education, data collection, certification, career ladder, supervision, offers best practices that can be replicated by social service workers and other community service providers. The data demonstrates that when all of these factors are considered and met, CHWs are best positioned to provide needed community services and improve health outcomes.

Developmental social work is a process of planned social change designed to promote the well-being of the population. The main objective of this study was to be realized by: examining social workers knowledge and perceptions towards developmental social work, identifying challenges faced by social workers on the utilization of developmental social work and exploring social workers’ suggestions on improving the utilization of developmental social work.

Interviews conducted with child protective services administrators and workers show that they are unaware of empirical evidence to support effectiveness and are unable to determine how to measure effectiveness. This article suggests collecting quality data and partnering with systems, such as healthcare, that have the infrastructure already in place for collection of this data.

Cambodia is moving forward with family-based alternative care initiatives that build on existing efforts to strengthen the child protection system. This short human rights in action article take a critical approach to the translation of policy to practice, highlighting the importance of collaboration between government and civil society, building workforce capacity and gatekeeping initiatives is discussed as essential to address challenges while strengthening responses to vulnerable children and families.

This report has been written for practitioners, academics, policy-makers and grant-making institutions. The learnings provide useful information for organisations which might be thinking about designing, implementing, funding or evaluating resilience-based work with street-connected children exposed to sexual abuse and sexual exploitation.

This policy brief aims to demonstrate how the social service workforce is vital to fulfillment of many of the 17 SDGs.

In the article, the authors pose a question: to what extent can we speak of social work practice in support of refugees in post-socialist Southeastern Europe given that in the region, which was part of the Balkans Humanitarian Corridor in 2015 and 2016, state-supported social work practice is very limited and very prescriptive at the same time? Among the conclusion, the authors show the importance for social workers achieving an autonomous professional standing and a degree of self-determination.