In collaboration with the Commonwealth of Kentucky Department of Community Based Services, Department of Children, Youth and Families, New Mexico, Cuyahoga County Children and Family Services, Cleveland, Ohio and Division of Children and Family Services and the Training Partnerships, Wisconsin, the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service has developed a trainer’s guide to a curriculum entitled 'Bringing Together the Child Welfare Team.' The curriculum, aimed at child welfare managers and supervisors, enhances their capacity to understand and implement the mandates of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA). Combining both individual and group learning opportunities, the curriculum focuses on the following topical areas:

• ASFA and the Final Rule Requirements, including goals, timeline, outcome measures and systemic factors
• State/County/Region goals and outcomes
• Strategic/action planning
• Impact of ASFA on practice, the child welfare agency, the service network and the role and responsibilities of the child welfare supervisor and manager
• Strengths and weaknesses in child welfare agency's current internal systems, using the systemic factors as checklist items
• Collaboration-- successful approaches within the agency and with community partners, tribes and courts
• Most helpful ways to use child welfare data and reports as supervisory and management tools to implement ASFA, including data analysis practice
• Review and discussion of selected reports that focus on ASFA/agency/unit goals, CFSR results, PIPs and outcomes and measures
• Skill Self Assessment

Other project accomplishments include:

• Field testing the curriculum in four sites which provided a range of organizational structures (for example, county based/ state based, providing juvenile justice services and not), training approaches (such as a partnership and agency trainers) and rural and urban delivery areas
• Evaluating the effectiveness and impact of the curriculum (see Reports, Year Three Project Evaluation )
• Updating and publishing the ASFA 'promising practices' implementation analysis
• Continuing to implement the national dissemination plan through presentations and publications on the project
• Implementing the Project Workplan.

Funded by the Children's Bureau, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, this project is managed by a team at the Institute for Child and Family Policy, Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service, University of Southern Maine. Federal funds for this project come from Section 426 of the Social Security Act, which provides funding to Institutions of Higher Education to train personnel in the field of child welfare.

For more information on this project, contact Susan Kanak, Project Director, by e-mail at skanak@usm.maine.edu or phone at 207.780.5840