Family-centered practitioners view all family members, including maternal and paternal relatives, fictive kin, and informal helpers, as important resources and sources of support for the family. These practitioners are skilled in engaging informal and formal community resources by involving them, as appropriate, in family assessment and case planning and in providing ongoing support to families before, during, and after services are ended by the formal child welfare agency and other community agencies. The following resources address how to engage community members to support children, youth, and families.
Community-Based Family Support: Exemplars with Implementation and Evaluation Strategies
Casey Family Programs (2016)
Focuses on the need for community-based initiatives and summarizes lessons learned from the design and implementation of current and past community-based support programs.
Community-Based Parent Support Programs (PDF - 130 KB)
Trivette & Dunst (2014)
Orelena Hawks Puckett Institute
Evaluates the efficacy of community-based parent support programs in building parenting capacity.
Community Partnerships for the Protection of Children
Center for the Study of Social Policy
Offers research results and lessons learned from efforts to improve outcomes for children, youth, and families by helping child welfare systems partner more effectively with key stakeholders and community members.
Mobilizing Communities to Implement Tested and Effective Programs to Help Youth Avoid Risky Behaviors: The Communities That Care Approach (PDF - 218 KB)
Hawkins, Catalano, & Kuklinski (2011)
Child Trends
Explores a study of youth that describes the Communities That Care (CTC) prevention system, the steps involved in implementing this system, and major findings from a community randomized controlled trial of CTC.
Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities (PDF - 4,905 KB)
Pennell, Shapiro, & Spigner (2011)
Center for Juvenile Justice Reform
Offers strategies for ensuring that youth involved with both child protection and juvenile justice maintain connections to their homes, schools, and communities and examines ways to advance family leadership in service systems.