CFPIC | Child & Family Policy Institute of California

A partnership consisting of CFPIC, CalSWEC, the California Evidence Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare, the California Department of Social Services, the Bay Area Social Services Consortium, the Southern Area Social Services Consortium, the Central California Social Services Consortium, and the Northern Directors Consortium has completed the fourth in a series of Evidence Based Practice Symposia designed to strengthen the partnership between the Child Welfare academic and practice communities in California. This January’s Symposium reflected on our work to date and updated the statewide Child Welfare research agenda that we formulated at last year’s Symposium. Researchers and agency leaders from throughout California attended the Symposium to lend their voices to the work that we have undertaken.

The proceedings from this Symposium will be available here soon.

On January 23. 2007, CFPIC, under the auspices of the Foster Youth Education Task Force and in partnership with, and very generous support from, Casey Family Programs, co-hosted the 2007 California Foster Youth Education Summit. In preparing for the Summit, a number of professionals and advocates from across California prepared background/issue papers that are presented here. In the coming months we will be finalizing the proceedings from the Summit, with specific recommendations for statewide policy and local implementation actions in each of these issue areas. These will be posted here and on other websites, and they will be distributed to Summit participants and other stakeholders as soon as they are finalized.

CFPIC co-hosted a series of Foster Youth Employment Forums in the Fall of 2006. 458 representatives from Child Welfare, Workforce Development, and other partners came together to learn about the basic elements of these two systems and to hear about promising practices that promote employment opportunities for foster youth. The final report from the forums provides a recap of the proceedings that occurred in Redding, Sacramento, Santa Ana, Oakland, and Madera and descriptions of model programs that can be replicated throughout California. Other links in the report provide important information about our partner in the Forums, New Ways to Work, and the important work of the Youth Transition Action Teams in various counties across the state.

View Report

On February 22, 2006, a Symposium was held in Los Angeles to develop a partnership between agency and university staff in order to develop a common research agenda for California’s Child Welfare community. Here are presentations from the Symposium.

Child Welfare Administrative Data:The UCB Performance Indicators Project by Barbara Needell (832 KB PowerPoint file)
CalSWEC Data Sets by Barry Johnson (148 KB PowerPoint file)
Our Code of Ethics as a guide for negotiating the realities of evidence-informed practice by Eileen Gambrill (36 KB PowerPoint file)
Data Revolution: National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW) by John Landsverk (96 KB PowerPoint file)
The California Evidence Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare Practice by Charles Wilson (1.2 MB PowerPoint file)

Evidence Based Practice
The Child and Family Policy Institute of California is working in partnership with other organizations to engage Human Services Agencies in discussions about the relevance of Evidence Based Practice to Child Welfare Services. In July, 2005, a Leadership Symposium on Evidence Based Practice was held in Sacramento, CA, to explore this topic. Presentations from that Symposium are available here:

California Child Welfare Clearinghouse on Evidence Based Practice
(5.2 MB PowerPoint file)
Evidence-based practice and policy in California: Choices ahead
(538 KB PowerPoint file)
Evidence-based Practice in the Social Services: Implications for Organizational Change (95 KB PDF file)
Implementing Evidence-based Practices (150 KB PowerPoint file)
BASSC "Evidence for Practice" (172 KB PowerPoint file)
Values-driven evidence-based practice matrix (38 KB Excel file)

The Child and Family Policy Institute of California supports the work of county Children’s Services programs that are delivered within the Human Services Agencies of each county. Children’s Services are those programs that work to prevent child maltreatment, intervene early in the development of family problems that pose a risk to child safety and well-being, and respond to reports of actual child maltreatment. Each county provides basic Child Welfare Services through the delivery of child protective services, in-home family supervision, foster care, adoptions, and transitional living services to youth who will be leaving the foster care system. In addition each county provides an array of discretionary programs that support and enhance families within their communities.