All families are dependent upon the services available in or near their communities to ensure the healthy development of their children. Child serving agencies and systems are likewise dependent upon community-based services to support parents, strengthen families and improve outcomes for the children they serve. In many communities, the necessary resources are unavailable to both families and the service delivery system. Lack of resources is a joint problem that requires a joint solution. The child welfare system alone cannot, and should not, create all the needed resources within communities in which families and children live. Conversely, communities are equally unable to solely ensure the availability of all assets critical to families, such as quality early care and education programs, family support centers, community recreation, out of school time programs, safe and affordable housing, and public transportation.
As a result, a shared need and responsibility exist between the agencies that rely on services to assist families and the families in communities that access those resources. In order to meet this shared responsibility, a partnership is required to build resources. More than twenty years ago, the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect issued a report detailing a crisis in the child protection system resulting from overwhelming demands and insufficient responses. The Board concluded, “…[I]t has become far easier to pick up the telephone to report one’s neighbor for child abuse than it is for that neighbor to pick up the telephone to request and receive help …. If the nation ultimately is to reduce the dollars and personnel needed for investigating reports, more resources must be allocated to establishing voluntary, non-punitive access to help.”[i] The Board’s proposal was a child-centered, neighborhood-based approach to supporting families and ultimately, protecting children.[ii] Yet, a strong system of community-based supports has been slow to develop, even though evidence demonstrates that “neighbors can collectively provide strong support to children and parents and that such support, when available on a regular basis, may reduce the incidence of violence.”[iii]
Community supports are best designed and developed by and through the community residents that will ultimately access the resources. A number of federal, state and locally supported initiatives have provided strong demonstrations of the shared responsibility and need that is served by the development of community-decision making collaborations. The Safe Kids/Safe Streets Initiative, funded by the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, succeeded in building broad-based collaboratives focused on child abuse and neglect issues in five very different communities. These five collaboratives enabled their communities to forge partnerships across agencies and engage a broad range of stakeholders in developing a plan for addressing child abuse and neglect along with the corresponding resources.[iv] The State of Maryland codified collaboration entities and provided funding to implement a local interagency service delivery system for children, youth, and families.[v] Maryland’s local collaboratives, made up of residents and agencies in each county, have effectively worked to identify local needs and develop resources to meet those needs. The District of Columbia has established and supported neighborhood collaboratives in which individuals and organizations come together in each neighborhood to form a coordinated network of services and supports for children and families. The District collaboratives have several functions; they provide direct services, coordinate services, develop community capacity, monitor progress, and coordinate resource development.[vi] In all three examples, local residents partnered with agency representatives to collectively meet their shared responsibility to families and communities.
A study of the effectiveness of community decision-making partnerships identified the key elements as: strong resident and community involvement; stable leadership; private sector and business involvement; and partnerships with an appointed or elected branch of government. The study further determined that effective collaboratives were:
- Developing new and innovative services and strategies,
- Improving access to services,
- Providing information and connecting residents to services, and
- Facilitating public agency system connections to natural helping systems.[vii]
Community level collaboration provides an opportunity to meet two vitally important objectives: to strengthen the continuum of services available to child welfare agencies and to provide resources for residents outside of the child protection system.
Specific state policy options are presented for each of the following areas:
9.1 Capacity for developing comprehensive, community-based services
9.2 Monitoring based on outcomes and service quality
9.3 Community based doorways to services
[i] U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect. 1980. Child Abuse and Neglect: Critical First Steps in Response to A National Crisis. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office
[ii] U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect. 1993. Neighbors Helping Neighbors: A New National Strategy for the Protection of Children. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office
[iii] Korbin, J. and Coulton, C. 1997. Understanding the neighborhood context for children and families: Combining epidemiological and ethnographic approaches. In Brooks-Gunn, J., Ducan, G. and Aber, J.L. (Eds.) Neighborhood Poverty. Volume II: Policy Implications in Studying Neighborhoods. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. And Sampson, R., Raudenbush, S. & Earls, F. 1997. Neighborhoods and violent crime: A multilevel study of collective efficacy. Science, 277(August 15), 918-924.
[iv] Gragg, F., R. Cronin, D. Schultz, & Eisen, K. 2004. National Evaluation Of The Safe Kids/Safe Streets Program: Final Report Volume I: Cross-Site Findings, Washington, DC: OJJDP/Westat
[v] Maryland Annotated Code, Human Services Article, Title 8-101 et. seq.
[vi] The Development of Neighborhood-based Child Welfare Services in the District of Columbia. 1998. Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Social Policy
[vii] Working Together to Improve Results: Reviewing the Effectiveness of Community
Decision-Making Entities. August 2006 Revised. Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Social Policy