Convening on Child Welfare Transformation hosted by the White House Domestic Policy Council

On Tuesday July 30, more than 800 people gathered in-person and virtually – including at over 20 watch parties across the country – to participate in a Convening on Child Welfare Transformation hosted by the White House Domestic Policy Council.

During the half day convening in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, Administration officials, Members of Congress, people with lived experience, and program and foundation leaders, discussed ways to create change at all levels to help families stay together safely, reshaping the child welfare and foster care systems to focus on keeping children in a home where they have a family member who loves, them whether they be their parent or kin.

Central to the discussion was how best to meet family needs and prevent unnecessary involvement in the child welfare system; the partnerships, research, and innovations that are key to creating system shifts that benefit families; and the role of kin in ensuring children can remain safely with family and in their community.

Neera Tanden, the Director of the Domestic Policy Council of the United States, opened the convening by discussing how leading with a family-centered approach is central to ensuring children thrive.

Representative Danny Davis from Illinois, a committed leader to making sure that our child welfare system is taking the best care of families, discussed the truly bipartisan Congressional commitment to improving child welfare, evidenced most recently by the unanimous passage of the Protecting America’s Children by Strengthening Families out of the House Ways and Means Committee last week. The long overdue bill offers vital assistance and funding to help strengthen and keep families together and support the safety and well-being of children in foster care.

The summit featured many of the innovations that are central to the Doris Duke Foundation’s moonshot goal of creating a new prevention paradigm in child welfare, including disconnecting poverty and neglect, providing families with concrete and economic support at the first sign of need, and practicing true partnerships with those who have been directly impacted by existing systems by including people with lived experience in the design and implementation of this new prevention paradigm.

Valerie Frost, a parent from Kentucky, shared her experiences with the child welfare system, movingly describing a time when her young children were almost taken away from her because she met certain risk factors. Her children are not alone. A shocking 53 percent of black children are investigated by Child Protective Services by the time they turn 18.

Valerie posed a series of questions many of us are asking ourselves: What if the child welfare system was set up differently? What if a call to the hotline came from a place of care and not judgment? What if we tossed the checklist of risk factors and instead viewed well-being gaps as opportunities for preventative support? What if we reserved the foster care system for truly indisputable scenarios of physical abuse or serious neglect?

Valerie’s questions are at the heart of the Doris Duke Foundation’s OPT-In for Families Initiative, which is being piloted in Kentucky, Oregon, South Carolina, and Washington, DC earlier this year, and aims to transform our nation’s response to children at risk of abuse and neglect by helping to build a prevention-oriented child well-being system that supports children and families within their communities. We believe that the two million families currently screened out by the child protection system are at an unacceptably high risk of descending into a vicious cycle of ongoing child welfare investigation referrals followed by intensive and intrusive interventions. Instead, what these families need most is engaged, proactive help from trusted members of their community.

In conjunction with the convening, the White House and the Administration for Children and Families, Department of Health and Human Services announced a series of new policies that make it easier to engage and support families seeking prevention services. Of particular interest to our OPT-In Initiative is the announcement from the Department of Health and Human Services, which clearly states that many of the engagement, case coordination, and service support costs can be covered under the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) – even when the service itself is paid for through a different funding stream (e.g., FFPSA can pay for child care so that the mom can attend mental health counseling paid for by Medicaid). There are some administrative requirements, but this is a huge opportunity for states to use this funding stream to support families and children. Another exciting development is that tribes with a state IV-E agreement have almost complete flexibility in implementing a prevention program – this may be particularly relevant for Oregon and other states.

In closing remarks, our president and CEO Sam Gill said that child well-being “is a problem that so many people write off as intractable, but it's profoundly soluble with the resources and the ingenuity that we have in this country. We have new generations of leaders who are ready to blaze trails. We have public and private institutions that are ready to deploy capital. At the Doris Duke Foundation, we are proud to be part of the philanthropic sector that invests $100 million a year in the people, organizations, and ideas that promote innovation in prenatal and child and family well-being. And I know all of us are taking a lot away from today about how we can continue to make sure that those investments are effective.”

It is my profound hope – my dream – that together, we will make a real difference in the well-being of children and families.

JooYeun Chang is the program director for child well-being at the Doris Duke Foundation. She oversees the program’s grantmaking to promote children’s healthy development and protect them from abuse and neglect.