Category: Webinars

November 14, 2022

This webinar will make the case that all new parents deserve to be offered a home visit by a highly qualified healthcare professional. Research has shown that postnatal visits can have significant prevention benefits, including a reduced risk of child abuse and neglect. A new initiative in Racine and Walworth counties will be described that aims to ensure that all parents with newborns are eligible for a home visit by a public health nurse. Grounded in the principle of progressive universalism, which balances equal access to care with an equitable distribution of resources, this program will be tailored to ensure that each family receives direct care and connections to community services that match their needs.

Watch the webinar recording here

September 14, 2022

Accessible, affordable and high-quality early childhood education (ECE) can contribute to cognitive, emotional and social development in children helping them grow into thriving, contributing adults. For parents and caregivers, ECE provides them with the opportunity for gainful employment, economic stability and self-sufficiency. The Jackson County Childcare Network (JCCN) identified Jackson County as an early childhood education desert, with capacity to only serve 278 children of the estimated 1000+ children in need of care. This disparity has resulted in an estimated $2.5 million loss in work productivity, parents unable to work to their full capacity, while 17.8% of children in the county live in poverty. The stressful conditions and circumstances associated with the lack of ECE options, un/under-employment, the effects of poverty, and toxic stress all are risk factors for poor child health outcomes, including increased risk for experiencing neglect.

In 2021, the Jackson County Action Initiative (JCAI) was formed to engage the local community to address the ECE crisis in Jackson County and enhance protective factors for families to mitigate negative outcomes and support family well-being. To achieve these goals and address this complex challenge, the JCAI is using a collective impact approach. Collective impact is a network of community members, organizations, and institutions who advance equity by learning together, aligning, and integrating their actions to achieve population and systems level change. In this webinar, you’ll learn about:

• The importance of early child education in supporting child, family, and community health and prosperity.
• Challenges around insufficient early childhood education facing rural communities.
• Core principles from the Collective Impact model and how the JCAI is applying them.
• Early lessons learned from this ongoing effort.

Watch the webinar recording here

August 17, 2022

Innovation, the process of trying new ideas to solve new or under addressed challenges has long been central to child maltreatment prevention. The ICFW Innovations in Prevention webinar series focuses on elevating innovations in Wisconsin, serve as a platform to share new ideas, and make connections across communities. This webinar focuses on the primary prevention of child maltreatment tactic referred to as the Family Strengthening approach. Rebecca Mather from Wisconsin’s Child Abuse Prevention Board provides a presentation focuses on:

• The dynamics and internal resources of the individual family as well as the community and social environment that surrounds it
• The Protective Factors Framework and how it is integrated into primary prevention, highlighting specific projects to support and strengthen families.
• A review of the Five for Families model and how it aligns with the Protective Factors Framework to support families.

Resources:

Wisconsin Child Abuse Prevention Board website

Five for Families website

Watch the webinar recording here

The Institute for Child and Family Well-Being was proud to host the Translational Design: An Introduction workshop led by Luke Waldo, ICFW Director of Program Design and Community Engagement, on August 3rd from 10:00-12:00 CST.

Why?

Children thrive when they have regular interactions with responsive, caring adults. Families experiencing significant stressors related to financial insecurity, housing instability, or the impact of systemic and interpersonal trauma can be overloaded with stress, interrupting those interactions. Over time, and without adequate supports, overloaded families can become vulnerable to adverse experiences, ranging from toxic levels of stress to involvement in the child welfare system, and even family separation for reasons of neglect.

A staggering 36,000 randomized controlled trials are published each year, on average, and it typically takes about 17 years for findings to reach clinical practice. Our understanding of brain science and human development has advanced dramatically in the past 20 years, and many of our evidence-based interventions have not caught up, so we must design and adapt solutions to ensure that they are effective. What’s in it for you?

What’s in it for you?

The Introduction to Translational Design workshop is an interactive presentation of:

• The impact of stress on childhood development and family functioning;
• Engaging content and context experts in the design and improvement processes;
• Identifying and framing the challenges that overloaded families face;
• Brainstorming and designing solutions to the challenges that the overloaded families face;
• Approaching learning as an outcome; and
• Design and strategic learning tools.

How?

Through an introductory session that explores why translational design is essential to balancing the latest brain science with the strengths and needs of your local context, participants will begin framing their programs through these questions:

• How might we center the voice and experience of overloaded families so that we may better understand their strengths, challenges and needs?
• How might we design our services so that they translate the latest science into the greatest possible impact on reducing the burden on overloaded families?

Watch the workshop recording here.

Social innovation within our complex systems, such as child welfare, housing and mental health, demands a difficult balance between trial and error, responsiveness to those directly impacted, and actively sharing learning to build on our progress and failures. Being a learning organization serves multiple purposes: creating institutional memory, supporting just-in-time iteration, and clarifying our hypotheses about our work. Engaging every staff member in these learning practices allows us to make our thinking visible to each other, strengthening our hypotheses and uncovering hidden assumptions. By keeping insights, assumptions, and hypotheses at the forefront of organizational consciousness, our learning practices ensure that the design of any future work is informed by the learning of prior endeavors.

As the ICFW serves as a translational organization, it is essential that our decision-making, planning, learning and dissemination function fluidly and efficiently. While there is no shortage of new innovative approaches to improve child and family well-being, our team must be strategic in identifying, selecting, implementing and testing in order to be effective in each phase of this process within our organizational capacity.

During this webinar on August 20th, ICFW team members Luke Waldo and Gabe McGaughey discussed the following:

• Why Strategic Learning is critical to effective Social Innovation;
• How the ICFW has implemented its Strategic Learning process and the tools that it uses;
• How the ICFW has used Strategic Learning tools to support the Children’s Wisconsin Community Services’ COVID Resilience Plan.

View the recorded webinar here.

Related Resources

From the ICFW:

• Webinar PowerPoint Presentation
• Strategic Learning Practice Brief
• After Action Reviews Practice Brief
• Building an Institutional Memory – ICFW Newsletter Article on Learning Logs
• Human-Centered Design Practice Brief

From Mark Cabaj:

• Developing Lessons Learned

From Greater Good Studio:

• The Gut Check

Stable housing provides a foundation for health, well-being, and prosperity for children, families, and communities. Stable housing can positively affect a broad spectrum of outcomes for children and families, including academic performance, employment, physical, and mental health. Threats to stable and healthy housing are complex and intertwined with systemic and interpersonal factors.

Families experiencing housing instability face increased risk of  their children being involved in the child welfare system . 81% of families with children entering care identified recent histories of housing instability, including crowding, homelessness, and evictions. Housing instability is also linked to delays in reunification, while placement in foster care  is also connected to youth homelessness.  Housing Opportunities Made to Enhance Stability (HOMES) is a systemic intervention focused on building new relationships, sharing ideas and knowledge, and starting new collaborations between housing and child welfare partners in the community.

In this webinar from July 30, 2020, ICFW team members Gabe McGaughey and Luke Waldo reviewed:

• The link between housing and child maltreatment
• The impact of stress and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have on executive functioning,
• The increased risk of housing instability in the age of COVID
• Systems change framework to inform strategy development and evaluation.
• Lessons learned from HOMES that can be applied to other system change efforts

Listen to the recorded webinar here.

Related Resources

From the ICFW:

Supporting Safe, Stable, and Healthy Housing

Housing Opportunities Made to Enhance Stability (HOMES) initiative

Infographic: Housing & Child Welfare

Infographic: Housing & Child Health

Other resources:

Evaluating Systems Change Results – Mark Cabaj

The Water of Systems Change – John Kania, et al, FSG

Helping Families Involved in the Child Welfare System Achieve Housing Stability – Mary Cunningham, et al. (2015) 

Eviction Lab COVID Eviction Tracking System

The Institute for Child and Family Well-Being was proud to host the webinar “Trauma screening, brief intervention and referral to treatment (T-SBIRT): Introduction to a promising, brief protocol for social service and healthcare settings.” Led by Dr. Dimitri Topitzes, Clinical Director of the Institute for Child and Family Well-Being, and Lisa Ortiz, UMOS, the webinar took place on June 17th at 11:00 CST.

This webinar introduced participants to a discrete trauma responsive protocol – trauma screening, brief intervention and referral to treatment or T-SBIRT – which has been implemented in various healthcare and social services settings in southeastern Wisconsin. Integrating T-SBIRT within such programs recognizes two interrelated truths: 1) most people experience significant adversity and trauma across the life course, an assertion that is all-the-more salient during this time of pandemic, stay-at-home orders, and collective trauma, and 2) frequent exposure to adversity and trauma undermines functioning across myriad domains including physical, mental, and behavioral health.

Delivered by psychotherapists, case managers, nurses, or other professional service providers, T-SBIRT helps programs address the effects of trauma exposure among clients or patients. More often than not, trauma is at the root of client and patient presenting problems. The protocol therefore contributes to effective and efficient trauma-responsive care and overall service delivery.

During the webinar, we described the T-SBIRT protocol, which is based on SBIRT for substance misuse and requires anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes to complete. In addition, we reviewed results from several studies that we recently published, indicating that it is feasible to implement T-SBIRT within healthcare and social service programs and that T-SBIRT may be associated with improved mental health and employment outcomes.

Dr. Topitzes, designed and tests T-SBIRT, and Lisa Ortiz is a supervisor who oversees implementation of T-SBIRT in her TANF program. While Dr. Topitzes provided details about the protocol and feasibility studies, Ms. Ortiz discussed her experience with T-SBIRT, highlighting obstacles to implementation along with perceived staff and client benefits.

Listen to the recorded webinar here.

Related Resources from the ICFW:

T-SBIRT Protocol (English version)

T-SBIRT Protocol (Spanish version)

ICFW Screening and Assessments: Childhood Experiences Survey, Adult Experiences Survey, Lifetime Experiences Survey

Fact Sheet: Understanding and Responding to Trauma

Issue Brief: Trauma Screening, Brief Intervention, Referral to Treatment (T-SBIRT)

Issue Brief: Asking Sensitive Questions

T-SBIRT Demonstration Video

Referenced websites for more information:

National Center for PTSD

“Stable housing is a foundation for family stability, not merely a reflection of it.”

                -Mary Cunningham

Stable housing provides a foundation for health, well-being, and prosperity for children, families, and communities. Stable housing can positively affect a broad spectrum of outcomes for children and families, including academic performance, employment, physical, and mental health. Threats to stable and healthy housing are complex and intertwined with systemic and interpersonal factors.

Families experiencing housing instability face increased risk of  their children being involved in the child welfare system . 81% of families with children entering care identified recent histories of housing instability, including crowding, homelessness, and evictions. Housing instability is also linked to delays in reunification; and foster care placement is also connected to youth homelessness.

If families experiencing housing instability are at greater risk of child maltreatment and placement into foster care, how can we take a systems approach to support families coping with housing instability, before getting involved in the child welfare system? Housing Opportunities Made to Enhance Stability (HOMES) is a systems change initiative focused on building new relationships, sharing ideas and knowledge, and starting new collaborations between housing and child welfare partners in the community. Housing as a Pathway to Prevent Child Maltreatment is a training ICFW Co-Director Gabriel McGaughey has delivered where participants learn about how brain science, strategic communication, systems change approaches, and design thinking have been used to connect child welfare, health, and housing in efforts to support child well-being.

View the presentation here.