From its inception in 1973, the Program for Children championed the belief that all children need stable, permanent families. Over nearly three decades, its focus shifted to address various points of intervention to help ensure child safety, security, and care. The program initially concentrated on moving hard-to-place children in foster care into permanent adoption. From 1985 to 1995, it supported intensive family preservation services (IFPS) to prevent unnecessarily placing children outside their homes, and helped more than 30 states adopt a model called Homebuilders, which sends specially trained workers into homes to help families learn skills to protect their children.

Acknowledging the limited ability of IFPS alone to influence outcomes in a complex child welfare system, the program turned in 1995 to an earlier intervention point for families and children and devised a strategy for advancing child protection reform that emphasizes the development of partnerships among public and private agencies, organizations, and individuals in communities. This initiative, known as the Community Partnership for Protecting Children, seeks to enhance the ability of communities to protect children from abuse and neglect by engaging a broad range of stakeholders in assuming responsibility for child safety.

Four cities have participated in the initiative since it began: Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Jacksonville, Florida; Louisville, Kentucky, and St. Louis, Missouri. In each city the Foundation supported partnerships among public and private agencies, neighborhood-based organizations, and parent and resident leaders to establish collaborative systems of community child protection. Key elements of the initial strategy included building a network of citizens and agency representatives who assume responsibility for preventing child abuse and neglect and for supporting families; creating an individualized action plan for each child identified as being at substantial risk of harm; changing practice, policy, and culture within the children’s protective services agency; and establishing a decision-making body that reviews the effectiveness of strategies for protecting children and engages the community in child safety.

Responsibility for the Community Partnership for Protecting Children initiative was transferred in 2001, when a grant established The Center for Community Partnerships in Child Welfare at the Center for the Study of Social Policy in Washington, D.C. Work to strengthen community partnerships continues in the four original cities and 50 other sites across the country under the leadership of former Children’s Program Director Susan Notkin.  Prior to Ms. Notkin, Peter Forsythe was the director of the program.

Additional Resources
The Center for Community Partnerships in Child Welfare website

Evaluation by the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago of the Community Partnership for Protecting Children initiative Report

Lessons Learned by Participating Sites about Community Partnerships for Protecting Children Report (PDF)