Planning Title IV-E Prevention Services: A Toolkit for States, Introduction to the Toolkit

The Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) marks an important shift in federal funding for child welfare services, and offers opportunities for states to receive Title IV-E reimbursement to fund some mental health (MH), substance use disorder (SUD), and in-home parent skill-based programs to help prevent entry into foster care. With the introduction of this reimbursement, states are considering the best ways to combine multiple funding mechanisms to pay for services and related supports for parents and children.

This toolkit aims to help states develop a plan for Title IV-E prevention services, and to assist states in planning a comprehensive array of services to help prevent the need for foster care placement (“prevention services”) by braiding Title IV-E prevention services reimbursement with Medicaid and other funding mechanisms.

This toolkit offers considerations for planning and provides links to many additional resources that may be useful to states. Its parts lead states through information and processes to help with assessing needs, opportunities, and potential funding sources in order to comprehensively plan prevention services, including those reimbursed by Title IV-E. The toolkit is organized as follows:

• Introduction to the Toolkit provides background on the toolkit, including information about parameters of Title IV-E prevention services, definitions of braiding and blending funding, and the stakeholder discussions that informed parts of the toolkit. It also describes how states can use the toolkit.
• Identifying and engaging partners reviews opportunities for cross-system collaboration and discusses partners and stakeholders who are likely to be helpful during planning. It also includes resources about engaging partners.
• Assessing population, service needs, and service coverage includes questions and information to consider about the current characteristics of your state’s population, the landscape of services and providers, and insurance coverage and funding. A comprehensive assessment will allow you to consider the needs of your population and identify service gaps.
• Determining priorities, goals, and actions discusses factors to consider in prioritizing planning for prevention services (including those reimbursable as Title IV-E prevention services) to address the needs of families with children at risk of entering foster care.
• Understanding roles of funding and decision points reviews funding mechanisms and key decision points for relevant services.
• Developing a plan for Title IV-E prevention services reviews how states can translate information from earlier parts of this toolkit into developing a Title IV-E prevention program plan. Part VI also reviews the contents of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) pre-print. (Text from the pre-print is included in Appendix D of this toolkit.) While this toolkit focuses on helping states to plan which services they will deliver and to whom, states will also need to consider additional operational details about how they will implement and monitor prevention services.
• Appendices to this toolkit include information about parameters for Title IV-E prevention services (Appendix A), comprehensive arrays of SUD and MH services (Appendix B), background on Medicaid (Appendix C) and text from the Title IV-E prevention program five-year plan pre-print (Appendix D).