About Us

 

The Idaho Child Welfare Research & Training Center is between Idaho Department of Health and Welfare Division of Family and Community Services (FACS), and Eastern Washington University . The Idaho Child Welfare Research & Training Center's mission is to promote the safety, permanency and well-being of the children and youth in Idaho's child welfare system of care and expand and refine the parties' support of Idaho's Child Welfare System of Care. The mission is supported and sanctioned by a shared mission and values, commitment, and governance structure that promotes the sharing, leveraging and effective coordination of funding resources, workforces, research and data, and public policy efforts.

We have been working together to develop strategies to improve child welfare services in a variety of fronts. Embedded in all strategies are efforts to address the disproportionality and disparate outcomes for youth of color in the child welfare system. The focus of the partnership will be to:

  • Develop an educated, highly trained, and experienced child welfare workforce;
  • Provide resource families with training to help them work with traumatized children;
  • Maximize funding by leveraging in-kind and monetary support from the formal and informal networks for each individual partner organization and federal matching programs; and
  • Track and measure the overall performance of the partnership to evaluate success.

The Idaho Child Welfare Research & Training Center values collaboration, practice innovations, education, evaluation, evidence-based child welfare practices and continuous quality improvement. The Partnership strives to improve the lives of children and families involved in public child welfare systems through collaborative work efforts to address work force development and evaluation. The Partnership is committed to advancing the child welfare system of care in Idaho by linking to other community stakeholders and constituency groups (resource families, alumni, kinship caregivers) to increase public awareness that will promote policy changes that improve the system.

Partnership activities are based on the following premises:

  1. Collaboration is the most effective means of achieving long term systems improvement
  2. Communication between partners is strengthened and services improved through on-going collaboration within the partnership
  3. Addressing the over-representation of children of color in the child welfare system is essential.

 


More Info

Based on priorities set by the Administrative Board, the partnership has identified the following seven challenges:

  1. Improving retention
  2. Providing quality education
  3. Using data to inform practice
  4. Integrating best practice into the workplace
  5. Providing quality training programs
  6. Improving recruitment
  7. Mitigating disparate outcomes for children and youth of color

Each challenge will be addressed through education, collaboration and with an effort and intent to address disproportionality.