Grant Proposal

Submitted by:

NC Association of County Directors of Social Services

Sharon Hirsch, Executive Director

215 Glenwood Avenue, Suite D

Raleigh, NC 27603

919-833-8020/FAX 919-833-9050

In Partnership with:

• NC Welfare Resource Exchange
• Jordan Institute for Families, UNC-CH School of Social Work
• Caldwell County Department of Social Services
• Edgecombe County Department of Social Services
• Guilford County Department of Social Services

Funds Requested: $608,000

Outcomes Targeted:

1. To improve work advancement, job training and wage improvement of non-custodial parents and to promote responsible fatherhood.
2. To assist recipients in creating safe neighborhood environments by eliminating criminal activity and other dangers to child and family safety and well being.
3. To identify families that have been sanctioned under Work First Family Assistance and to provide programs and services designed to eliminate barriers to compliance.

The North Carolina Association of County Directors of Social Services requests $608,000 to conduct pilot projects in three counties aimed at restructuring the service delivery process by integrating the Work First and Child Welfare "worlds." Such an integration would allow service providers to holistically and collaboratively staff cases with the goals of addressing issues of intergenerational poverty and family violence which would ultimately enhance family self-sufficiency and child well-being. A Community Collaboration Institute will be held to generate ideas for improving public policies to make collaboration among public, non-profit and private agencies easier to achieve and to equip participants will greater knowledge and skills to lead successful collaborative initiatives in their communities. A critical component of the project will be sharing promising practices and lessons learned so that they can be replicated across the 100 counties. Based on a model developed in El Paso County, Colorado, this project would target the following outcomes identified in the Division of Social Services Request for Proposals listed above.

North Carolina Division of Social Services

Proposal

Organization: NC Association of County Directors of Social Services

Project Title: TANF/Child Welfare Collaborative

Grant Request: $608,000

The North Carolina Association of County Directors of Social Services requests $608,000 to conduct pilot projects in three counties aimed at restructuring the service delivery process by integrating the Work First and Child Welfare "worlds." Such integration would allow service providers to holistically and collaboratively staff cases with the goals of addressing issues of intergenerational poverty and family violence, which would ultimately enhance family self-sufficiency and child well-being. A Community Collaboration Institute will be held to generate ideas for improving public policies to make collaboration among public, non-profit and private agencies easier to achieve and to equip participants will greater knowledge and skills to lead successful collaborative initiatives in their communities. A critical component of the project, TANF/Child Welfare Collaborative, will be sharing promising practices and lessons learned so that they can be replicated across the 100 counties. Based on a model developed in El Paso County, Colorado, this project would target the following outcomes identified in the Division of Social Services’ Request for Proposals:

1. To improve work advancement, job training and wage improvement of non-custodial parents and to promote responsible fatherhood.
2. To assist recipients in creating safe neighborhood environments by eliminating criminal activity and other dangers to child and family safety and well being
3. To identify families that have been sanctioned under Work First Family Assistance and to provide programs and services designed to eliminate barriers to compliance.

Both the TANF and child welfare systems share many of the same families, but agencies currently work with families separately, rather than holistically. This project aims to bring together the Public Assistance and Child Welfare "worlds" to holistically and collaboratively staff families’ cases with the goals of addressing issues of intergenerational poverty and family violence to enhance family self-sufficiency and child well-being. Therefore, the target populations for these pilots are TANF families and child welfare families who are eligible for TANF support services. Because these pilots will be conducted within county departments of social services, TANF eligibility will be the criteria for inclusion in the program. The number of families served will be determined by each county’s TANF and child welfare caseloads of families with incomes up to 200% of the federal poverty level. All families meeting these criteria will be served using the TANF/Child Welfare Collaborative team approach.

As the Work First caseload is declining, we must reinvest TANF savings into programs that strengthen families, assure child safety and address poverty issues. TANF must become the primary prevention program for child welfare and the child welfare program must, in turn, become an anti-poverty program. TANF, Food Stamps, Medicaid, Child Care, Welfare-to-Work and related programs must be redefined as supports to strengthen families. Both programs must share a common vision, philosophy and system of care to eliminate intergenerational poverty and family violence in our communities. Success must be measured by how well programs contribute to the mission of strengthening families, ensuring safety, promoting self-sufficiency, reducing poverty and enhancing the quality of life. To accomplish this, we are proposing a pilot to integrate the public assistance and child welfare programs in three (3) North Carolina counties: Caldwell, Guilford and Edgecombe and to share the lessons these counties learn throughout the integration process. In addition to the three pilots, using the "Challenge for Children/Families for Kids Model," the NC Association of County Directors of Social Services will encourage all of North Carolina’s counties to aim to meet the same goals as the counties in the TANF/Child Welfare Collaboration pilot counties. Often when pilot projects are initiated, there are no plans for sharing lessons learned and to encourage similar reforms beyond the pilots. To help facilitate a statewide system change, the Association will promote the policy model in its web page, newsletters and conferences and will share promising practices and other relevant project information on the NC Welfare Resource Exchange web site. The Jordan Institute for Families will serve as special consultants to the project to provide training and technical assistance on collaboration and in utilizing management information across TANF and child welfare programs.

The three pilot counties, as well as those taking the TANF/Child Welfare Collaboration Challenge, will agree to the Guiding Principles for the TANF/Child Welfare Collaborative.

The System of Care must:

• be family driven
• protect the rights of families
• allow smooth transitions between programs
• build community capacity to serve families
• emphasize prevention and early intervention
• be effectively integrated and coordinated across systems

Services must be:

• culturally respectful
• evaluated for outcomes
• delivered by competent staff
• accessible, accountable and comprehensive
• individualized to meet the needs of families
• strength-based and delivered in the least intrusive manner

Each pilot county will be given $150,000 to support this initiative. Using the Families for Kids (child welfare), Success for Families (TANF) and Smart Start community collaboration models, pilot counties will hire staff or contract with a consultant to specialize in community collaboration to involve members of the community to hear their stories and ask for their input, form diverse partnerships with other helping organizations, with the goal of improving the systems for reducing poverty and family violence. Just as Families for Kids is not a "DSS Program" and Work First is not solely a "DSS Program", these pilot projects will focus on collaborative community partnerships with active involvement with businesses, non profits, faith community partners, schools and, other government agencies sharing a common vision to eliminate intergenerational poverty and family violence. Each county will also hire a performance team director or contract with a consultant to collect and analyze data, conduct ongoing agency self-evaluations to monitor progress in meeting outcome goals and to lead planning efforts for continuous improvement toward reaching those outcome goals. If a county already has staff dedicated to promoting community collaboration or collecting and analyzing data, that county may use its $150,000 in funding to support their locally developed TANF/Child Welfare Collaborative Plan by focusing those resources on meeting one of their goals. For example, a county may want to focus some of its resources on developing a father’s parenting program or on establishing resources for kinship care or tracking earnings of employed parents.

The Jordan Institute for Families at the UNC-CH School of Social Work will provide consultation by facilitating community collaboration dialogue meetings, providing collaboration training and providing management data on programs to guide program-planning decisions based on their databases of TANF and child welfare caseloads. Cross-systems training on TANF and Child Welfare will include assessments and services and will incorporate substance abuse, domestic violence and mental health issues. Collaboration Training will be built into the community dialogue process facilitated by the Jordan Institute staff. The Jordan Institute will also train county management staff to access and use management information system data to better plan programs to meet the pilots’ outcome goals.

Pilot counties will be encouraged to redesign their systems of care by using local collaborative planning groups to include, but not be limited to: businesses, family members, domestic violence agencies, faith communities, elected officials, mental health agencies, substance abuse agencies, health departments, court officials, Employment Security Commission, community colleges, public schools and other local human services and community-based agencies. Emphasis will be placed on kinship care, domestic violence, child care, support for teen parents, employment support for custodial and non custodial parents and family preservation services with local flexibility for achieving goals. Collaboration may be achieved with out-sourced contracts, co-location of facilities, interagency agreements or any other means determined locally.

Communication among and between the pilot counties and challenge counties will be ongoing during the project. A list serv will be established for county coordinators to share information on their progress, hurdles they have encountered and potential solutions. In addition, the pilot counties and the North Carolina Association Of County Directors Of Social Services office will use H.323 video conferencing/distance learning technology to hold real time video based meetings and have discussions during the development of the project. H.323 technology is also available in other North Carolina communities. We will be exploring the availability of current sites for our use as well to connect many of the challenge counties to these discussions. By providing this technology to the pilot counties, we will be increasing the State’s capacity to use this technology in the future with other human service agencies.

During the first six months of the project, work will be done to establish a common vision within the agency and larger community to focus on intergenerational poverty and family violence. Much work will be done to establish and strengthen relationships among the community’s partners and agreements will be established for working together, sharing information about the families being served, establishing benchmarks and tracking outcomes. By the end of the first six months, each pilot county will have developed a community collaboration plan for a system of care to tackle intergenerational poverty and family violence.

In order to help achieve a common collaborative vision for TANF and Child Welfare, the NC Welfare Resources Exchange (WRE) will:

1. Identify existing and developing child welfare/TANF resources, promising practices, calendar items, etc. to post to the WRE web site.
2. Add search criteria specifically related to child welfare/TANF issues to its searchable database so visitors to the web site may easily find relevant promising practices and resources.
3. Write two special e-mail updates focused on child welfare/TANF information for an email distribution list of those interested in child welfare/TANF issues.
4. Highlight child welfare/TANF efforts at appropriate conferences and events, including the NORTH CAROLINA ASSOCIATION OF COUNTY DIRECTORS OF SOCIAL SERVICES "Showcase 2000" promising practices conference in April 2000.

When the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act was signed in 1996, many predicted that children would migrate to the child welfare system because TANF would no longer be available to meet families’ basic needs. That has not yet materialized even with the dramatic drops in the Work First caseload. However, the number of "child only" TANF cases has remained fairly consistent. At the same time, virtually all the money and resources in the child welfare system are used for expensive "back end" services such as institutionalized care and other forms of out-of-home placements and treatment. Many argue that if we give more attention to prevention and early intervention, we will see better outcomes for children and families and save money in the long run. When professionals and advocates in both the child welfare and public welfare systems are asked what is needed to prevent poverty or child abuse and neglect, the answers are remarkably similar: address poverty, employment, housing, nutrition, medical care, substance abuse, education and training. Resources need to be dedicated to childcare, transportation and domestic violence. In some NC counties, up to 50% of the current Work First caseload represents "child only" cases. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, in 1996 families with incomes of $15,000 per year or less were 22 times more likely to be in the child welfare system than families with incomes of $30,000 or more. The stresses of poverty have long been recognized as influential in incidences of abuse and neglect.

Yet, as their management information systems have developed in a "smokestack fashion" over the last 30 years, so separately have the public assistance and child welfare programs developed in county Departments of Social Services. During the NC Department of Health and Human Services’ Business Process Reengineering (BPR) project, current system deficiencies were identified, including: too many non value-added activities for families; redundant data collection processes; minimal communication among systems, programs, agencies and partners; lack of self-determination options for families; and lack of support for agencies moving to a "single worker" concept. The new Business Process developed includes seamless communication; is focused on outcomes; uses automated tools; provides county flexibility; provides multiple access options for families; enhances partnerships and has built-in accountability. This project will help move counties toward the new Business Process that has been envisioned.

The TANF/Child Welfare Collaborative Project will be sustained because it is designed to share best practices and be replicated. Because the project’s goal is an institutional systems change, it will be sustained once agencies redesign their services and begin to serve families with a holistic, collaborative community approach that focuses on family strengths with the goal of reducing intergenerational poverty and family violence. The institutional systems change will grow new and deepen existing collaborative partnership relationships in pilot communities. Because the Association and the Welfare Resource Exchange will be promoting promising practices, outcome goals and results, the system changes will remain and continue to be replicated by other counties. Further, the Community Collaboration Institute is a key part of our strategy to build local capacity to collaborate to bring together the essential partners necessary to help families tackle the complex issues of intergenerational poverty and family violence. Additional funding may be needed beyond the first year to continue the collaborative and data-sharing efforts. A request for additional funds will be based on our evaluation of the current project and our ability to meet our outcome goals.

The North Carolina Association of County Directors of Social Services will serve as the coordination point for the project, facilitating communication among the pilot counties and challenge counties; coordinating program information and resources with project partners; producing the "Community Collaboration Institute"; and promoting the TANF/Child Welfare Collaboration Goals statewide through its quarterly newsletter, website and at the 2000 Social Services Institute in November 2000. The role of the North Carolina Association of County Directors of Social Services will be to direct the project. The Directors’ Association will promote statewide, systemic change to encourage counties and State level support to restructure the service delivery process by bringing together the Public Assistance and Child Welfare "systems" to holistically and collaboratively staff cases with the goals of addressing issues of intergenerational poverty and family violence to enhance family self-sufficiency and child well-being. Sharon Hirsch, Executive Director of the Association, will serve as the Project Manager. A project coordinator will be recruited to oversee the day-to-day work of the project, under the supervision of Ms. Hirsch. Ms. Hirsch and the Projector Coordinator will work with project partners Janet Schipporeit with the NC Welfare Resource Exchange, Gary Nelson and Christine Howell at the Jordan Institute for Families and the Directors in the pilot counties – Sammy Haithcock in Caldwell County, Hobert Freeman in Edgecombe County and John Shore in Guilford County - to coordinate project activities and direction. Letters of support from these organizations are included in the attachments.

In order to promote continued learning and to share promising practices, the NC Association of County Directors of County Directors of Social Services will contract with the national award-winning NC Welfare Resource Exchange (NC WRE) to share resources and promising practices on it’s web page. The web page includes resources, promising practices and a searchable database of programs. WRE’s role will be to post resources and practices specific to the TANF/Child Welfare connection to enable pilot counties to learn from each other and, more importantly, to encourage non-pilot counties to initiate their own efforts based on the lessons learned. The Welfare Resource Exchange will provide these services, along with two WREsources Update email newsletters focused on the TANF/Child Welfare connection during the project. These services will be provided on a contract basis, not to exceed $30,000.

The expertise of the Jordan Institute for Families will be utilized in facilitating community dialogues, in teaching effective collaboration techniques and in teaching communities how to access and manage data across the TANF and child welfare systems. The Jordan Institute will provide these services on a contract basis, not to exceed $20,000.

The mission of the NC Association of County Directors of Social Services is to inform, educate and empower members in order to strengthen agencies, programs and the delivery of social services to families and individuals. The Association was instrumental in establishing the NC Welfare Resource Exchange, is a founding member of the Covenant with NC’s Children, is a member of the NC Coalition on Aging and the State Council for Social Legislation and has collaborated on numerous projects with the East Carolina University School of Social Work and Criminal Justice Studies and the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Social Work. The Association sponsors at least four major educational, policy or training conferences each year, maintains an informational web site, produces a quarterly newsletter and maintains an active email list serv for information sharing. The Association is currently the fiscal agent and houses the NC Welfare Resource Exchange and the Association’s Executive Director, Sharon Hirsch, serves as the WRE Advisory Board Chairperson.

The NC Welfare Resource Exchange is a collaborative of representatives from NC’s business community, faith community, County DSS Directors, state government agencies, advocacy organizations and grass roots groups (see Appendix for brochure which includes a list of WRE’s Advisors). WRE was created to promote practices, foster more collaboration and resource sharing in North Carolina around welfare reform with an eye to improving outcomes for children and their families. NC WRE recently received the Non Profits and Technology Innovations Award from OMB-Watch.

Named for one of North Carolina's most prominent families and in recognition of Michael Jordan's generous support, the Jordan Institute for Families has one goal--to strengthen families by:

• Promoting interdisciplinary research on the needs, concerns, and priorities of families; and
• Insuring that the findings of research are translated into public policy and program-relevant applications.

The staff and faculty associates of the Jordan Institute provide leadership to support and strengthen families through education, public service, and research. Through these activities, they seek to:

• Develop innovative solutions to the challenges facing families and communities;
• Explore and share throughout the state and nation practices and policies that strengthen families; and
• Encourage informed debate about diverse approaches for strengthening families and their communities.

More than 100 faculty and staff associated with the Jordan Institute are engaged in a variety of research, evaluation, and technical assistance projects involving issues affecting families and the communities in which they live. Among their current research projects that are relevant to the TANF/Child Welfare Collaborative are: Evaluation of Family to Family: Restructuring Foster Care; Management Assistance in the Work First Program; Human Services Smart Agency; Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiatives Evaluation Project; Evaluation of North Carolina’s Title IV-E Waiver Demonstration; Children’s Mental Health Project; and the School Success Profile Project.

The measurable outcome goals for the TANF/Child Welfare Collaborative project are:

1. Increase community-based support for families to eliminate poverty and family violence;
2. Establish one casework team per family (social work and eligibility specialists from in and out of the DSS agency);
3. Reduce the Work First caseload;
4. Increase child support collections and involvement of fathers in parenting;
5. Increase the number of adoptions or permanent kinship care placements for children in foster care;
6. Reduce high-end residential foster care placements;
7. Reduce the number of children in foster care;
8. Reduce the number of reports of abuse and neglect; and
9. Increase the number of employment placements for custodial and non-custodial parents.

Each county pilot will be asked to set benchmarks and quantifiable goals for each of these outcome measures in their local plans. Once the local plans are developed, they will be shared with the Division of Social Services. Reports on their progress in meeting the outcome goals will be given at the end of the first year of the project and every six months thereafter. The data will also be used on an ongoing basis to continually assess the pilot organization’s effectiveness in meeting goals and planning services. Data used to determine if counties are meeting their goals will be taken from the Division of Social Services’ information systems that are currently in place, including EIS, EPIS, INSYNC and CIPITS. Where appropriate, other relevant eligibility information systems housed in the Department of Health and Human Services, including Food Stamps and Medicaid/Health Choice data will be utilized to determine how successful families are in moving out of intergenerational poverty. By using this data for planning and ongoing evaluation, evaluation is an integral part of the local process, not simply a tangential activity.

In addition, we will monitor the number of hits to the North Carolina Association of County Directors of Social Services and WRE web sites on promising practices to determine usage. We will also conduct a user survey evaluation of the effectiveness of the web pages. Another measure of our success will be in the number of counties that take the "TANF/Child Welfare Collaborative Challenge" to attempt to work toward the above listed outcome goals without the additional funding given to the pilot counties. Further, we will conduct an evaluation of the Community Collaboration Institute to determine the Institute’ effectiveness and to solicit feedback on future initiatives and training needs to foster further collaboration.

Funding for this project will add value to existing DHHS initiatives, including Work First, Families for Kids, Safe Kids, Success for Families, Smart Start, NC Helping Dads, Business Process Re-engineering and other projects by:

1. Establishing a common vision for child welfare and TANF to eliminate intergenerational poverty and family violence.
2. Establishing a mechanism for sharing information on programs on the TANF/child welfare connection so that more groups can learn from and replicate promising practices already in place.
3. Increasing collaborative efforts around these issues.
4. Increasing progress toward the vision of the newly envisioned Business Process for DSS agencies, including seamless communication; a focus on outcomes; county flexibility; multiple access options for families; enhanced partnerships and built-in accountability
5. Increasing the efficient use of limited resources.
6. Establishing the coordination of Public Assistance and child welfare as a systemic priority.
7. Helping to determine where replication and unnecessary functions are occurring so that more streamlined and efficient services may be provided to families in the least intrusive manner.

County Pilots $ 471,000

NC Association of County Directors of Social Service $ 87,000

Collaboration Partner Consultant Fees $ 50,000

For hiring/contracting a collaboration coordinator and a performance team leader. In counties that already have these positions on staff, the money may be expended toward reaching the community’s planning goals.

Caldwell County $150,000

Edgecombe County $150,000

Guilford County $150,000

H.323 Technology (in each pilot county @ $7,000) $ 21,000

Salary and fringes 45,000

Telephone 1,000

Overhead/Admin. Expenses 5,000

Electronic Communications (Internet Access) 1,000

Web Page Maintenance 6,000

Community Collaboration Conference (Spkr. Fees) 10,000

Software 1,000

Printing 4,000

Postage 2,500

Supplies 1,500

Staff Travel 3,000

Computer Equipment (H.323 technology) 7,000

• NC Welfare Resource Exchange $30,000

- Jordan Institute for Families $20,000