Resources Database

Catawba County Social Services (CCSS) child welfare operations, in response to increased national emphasis on child well-being and healthy life-time family connections for youth exiting foster care, has pioneered an approach to post-permanency support services. The Child Wellbeing Project, as it is called, was initially designed to investigate which long-term social services would be most effective to improving life outcomes of children and their families once exiting foster care.

This report of a pilot fostering project includes an overview of the process for working with staff and practitioners for improving the quality of care in the homes and supporting families to develop alternative care options including family support, fostering and respite care.

Findings highlight that, although nearly all child welfare workers interviewed recognized the importance of instrumental and expressive support, many workers did not capitalize on support. Policy can promote supportive atmospheres through providing child welfare agencies with the ability and time to foster recently hired workers’ skills.

The Guidelines provide practical guidance for effective reintegration that can help organizations to design high quality programs; measure impact; train practitioners; and pursue national level systemic change in support of reintegration.

This introductory guide offers a brief overview of avenues for legal advocacy. It also offers guidance on how to explore options, and how to promote legal advocacy work with other children’s rights advocates. This guide is useful for child rights advocates interested in learning more about collaboration with the justice sector.

Most governments have systems for tracking critical health indicators, but these systems are not often linked to the data systems used by social and community services, where people often access care. As a result, the systems are fragmented and unable to provide holistic information for decision-making on health and social services. This publication includes a list of prerequisites for an integrated community healthy and social service data system to collect reliable data for decision making.

The purpose of this document is to provide guidelines for other countries and implementing partners overseeing OVC programming, so they can adapt the process that Uganda developed to help government and implementing partners identify and prioritize households with, affected by, or at high risk for HIV for enrollment in orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) programming.

This guide for professionals working with vulnerable children on the move promotes the development of a well-connected, transnational network of child protection professionals, and proposes an eight-step procedure to deliver a holistic continuity of care.

Integrated community case management (iCCM) programs are expanding rapidly in many low– and middle–income countries, particularly in sub–Saharan Africa. This paper aims to synthesize lessons learned from recent experience developing and implementing systems for routine monitoring of large scale iCCM programs.

The Bantwana community-based case management model was designed by the Children First program (2008-2012). The project grew into an important national partnership between the World Education Inc./Bantwana, government ministries, funders and local implementing partners and further developed into the National Case Management System adopted by the Government of Zimbabwe. This case study documents this journey in Zimbabwe from a project pilot to a national system.

The Yekokeb Berhan project has been operating in Ethiopia since 2011 to reduce vulnerability among children and families affected by HIV and AIDS by strengthening supportive systems and structures to deliver essential services and increase resiliency.  This case study describes the coordinated care approach used by Yekokeb Berhan including a summary of each step and an explanation of the specific tools. The data collection, storage and use processes, which are designed to ensure local ownership, are also described.

4Children has prepared a series of case studies documenting the core components of the case management process within orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) programming and national child protection systems, in three different countries. These case studies aim to provide examples of how case management can be used to support work with vulnerable children and families affected by or living with HIV. The experiences, approaches, and tools used by the three different programs share some commonalities as well as challenges and lessons learned.

The SCORE project has been providing holistic services to vulnerable children and families in Uganda since 2011.  SCORE’s household case management approach facilitates enrolled households to progress out of extreme vulnerability and graduate from direct project support to self-sufficiency. This case study describes SCORE’s graduation model, processes for coordination with other case management systems and data collection, storage, and use.

Seven critical steps are outlined in the case management process to guide the case worker along the process from identifying vulnerable children to closing their cases.

This online training program focuses on what is transfer of learning and strategies for implementing.

Evidence-based, tactical advocacy is key to reforming care policy and winning the public resources needed to gear-up programs for the care, protection and development of vulnerable children. This article highlights some of the challenges as well as provides recommendations for advocacy efforts for policy-makers to address these concerns at the country-level.

For the most significant epidemiological impact, PEPFAR 3.0 is focusing investments on the highest impact interventions in key geographic areas where data demonstrate the highest prevalence of HIV. 4Children conducted this study to map the catchment area of the comprehensive HIV care and treatment facilities to show the spatial relationship between the clients’ residences compared to where they access HIV services to ensure that PEPFAR-supported activities are located in areas where they will reach as many clients as possible.

This paper examines perceptions of time and institutional support for decision making and staff confidence in the ultimate decisions made within four countries. The study identifies a high degree of work pressure across all the countries, lines of predominantly vertical institutional support and relatively high confidence in decisions. Finland stands out with higher perceived work pressure and with a horizontal support line, whereas England stands out with workers having a lower degree of confidence in their own and others’ decisions.

A summary of numerous studies and literature across the United States, the report shares the factors that impact readiness and retention levels of new child welfare social workers. Strategies for selective screening and hiring of the most qualified child welfare workers are outlined in the report.

The Ministry of Health and Social Welfare and the Ministry of Community Development, Gender and Children, with UNICEF and other development partners, are building a system for holistic attention to protection issues including both prevention and response. This case study details the complexity of a comprehensive child protection system, which requires a multitude of actors to understand their roles and fulfil their obligations.