Beyond Checking the Box: How Participating in a Breakthrough Series Collaborative Supported the Efforts of Five Child Welfare Agencies to Engage Fathers and Paternal Relatives
OPRE Report #2023-223
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Associated Project
Fathers and Continuous Learning in Child Welfare
Prepared for:
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families
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Key Findings
- The FCL BSC helped agencies develop new father and paternal and relative engagement strategies and continue existing efforts. Despite challenges such as staff turnover and limited staff capacity, child welfare agencies continued to use strategies to engage fathers and paternal relatives after the BSC ended.
- Child welfare staff reported that father and paternal relative engagement had improved with their agencies’ participation in the FCL BSC. Program data showed mixed engagement success with room for continued improvement. Overall, it was challenging for agencies to collect and use data to inform their practice and report on improvements.
- Child welfare staff reported that their agencies had become more intentional about working with fathers and paternal relatives. They reported that active and engaged leaders promoted father and paternal relative engagement. To shift culture, agencies pursued officewide initiatives focused on the importance of fathers and paternal relatives and strategies such as making child welfare offices more welcoming and father-friendly. Community partners acknowledged the agencies’ efforts to shift organizational culture. Community partners, agency staff, and fathers and paternal relatives noted room for continued improvement.
- Child welfare agency staff reported that participating in the FCL BSC was a valuable experience. Participating in the BSC helped child welfare agencies focus on addressing challenges in providing services, identify solutions with support from experts and other agencies, create new partnerships and reinforce existing ones, and lay a foundation for changes in practice and culture.
Despite research documenting the importance of a father’s positive involvement in the life of a child and the family and the benefits of the involvement of extended family members for children’s well-being, fathers and paternal relatives have historically not been well engaged in child welfare services. To build the knowledge base for engaging fathers and paternal relatives in child welfare, the Administration for Children and Families contracted with Mathematica and the University of Denver to conduct the Fathers and Continuous Learning in Child Welfare (FCL) project.
As a part of FCL, six teams representing five child welfare agencies received support through a collaborative learning approach called a Breakthrough Series Collaborative (BSC) to develop and test strategies to improve the engagement of fathers and paternal relatives in child welfare services. This report describes their ongoing work to engage fathers and paternal relatives since the FCL BSC ended in March 2021, and assesses the potential contributions of the FCL BSC to lasting change.
The descriptive evaluation described in this report aimed to assess the progress agencies made in supporting father and paternal relative engagement in three outcome domains: (1) organizational cultures and networks; (2) staff skills and attitudes; and (3) documented changes in father and paternal relative engagement outcomes, such as levels of identification, engagement in child welfare activities, and the extent to which their needs are assessed and addressed. The descriptive evaluation also documented potentially promising strategies that agencies developed and continued to use after the conclusion of the FCL BSC. Findings are primarily based on the observations and reports of child welfare agency staff. In this report, the research team does not make any statistical inferences or causal claims about the FCL BSC’s influence.
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