Ten years ago, a shared concern brought leaders at Children’s Wisconsin and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee together: As children were moving through the child welfare system achieving safety and permanency, many continued to carry the weight of unaddressed trauma.
That gap, alongside a shared commitment to addressing it, led to the creation of the Institute for Child and Family Well-Being (ICFW), a community-university partnership launched in 2016.
ICFW’s origins trace back to early collaboration between Children’s Wisconsin and UWM faculty, including social work Professors James “Dimitri” Topitzes, and Josh Mersky, who co-founded the institute.
In 2014, Mersky and Topitzes completed a National Institutes of Health-funded study of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy with foster families. Following the positive results, they partnered with Children’s Wisconsin to integrate this evidence-based parent training intervention into their routine-care child welfare services.
“What made it work wasn’t just the intervention,” said Gabe McGaughey, co-director of ICFW and a Children’s Wisconsin staff member. “It was the partnership — bringing rigorous evidence together with a willingness to understand real-world implementation and adapt to what families actually need.”
Early success with Parent-Child Interaction Therapy led to expanded training for psychotherapists and broader dissemination of evidence-based treatments for children and families experiencing adversity.
An institute designed for real-world impact
From the beginning, ICFW was structured differently from a traditional academic center. It operates as a community-university partnership, combining frontline practical experience with research expertise.
Its work is organized around four core areas:
- Developing and adapting effective programs.
- Conducting applied, high-quality research.
- Engaging communities.
- Promoting systems and policy change.
A defining feature of the institute is its focus on translational work — ensuring that evidence-based practices are not only effective, but also feasible in everyday service settings.
“We’re less interested in developing programs that work in controlled environments,” Mersky noted. “Our focus is on solutions that can be implemented in real-world contexts and scaled to reach large populations.”
Colleen Janczewski’s role as a policy and practice analyst in the institute has been vital in this regard. Janczewski routinely collaborates with ICFW personnel at UWM and Children’s Wisconsin with the aim of translating practice and policy innovations into structural changes in social service systems.
“As a community-university partnership, the institute is uniquely positioned to learn from the people who lead, work within, and are served by social service systems in the state and nationally,” Janczewski said.
“I find it very fulfilling, for example, when a state partner turns to the institute for help answering a real-world policy question. Our work helps inform decisions and investments that strengthen services for children and families in communities across Wisconsin.
A unique incubator for innovation
For Topitzes, this cross-cutting approach to research, practice, policy and systems change is what makes ICFW a unique incubator for innovation.
“We adapt and design programs for real-life social service settings, implement them and rigorously test them,” he said. “Then we use what we learn to help shape agency, city, county and state policy.”
One example is Trauma Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (T-SBIRT), a trauma-informed approach that helps providers identify and respond to trauma in accessible, practical ways.
Topitzes has led the charge in developing this new approach to how professionals respond to those who have experienced trauma, done largely through an interview format. This new approach includes reducing distress, increasing awareness of experiences and situations, providing support and potentially recommending additional counseling.
Aside from the T-SBIRT work Topitzes has championed, Mersky also highlighted the novel work led by their colleagues at Children’s Wisconsin that aims to reframe the child welfare industry. Mersky emphasized that the system can do more to protect children and strengthen families.
“What Gabe McGaughey and Luke Waldo are trying to do is to counterbalance the child welfare system’s mandated reporting philosophy with a mandated supporting philosophy,” Mersky said. McGaughey is the director of well-being for Children’s Wisconsin Community Services and a co-founder of the institute, while Waldo serves as director of program design and community engagement, having joined in 2017.
“If you’re going to require families to be involved in the system, then you should also be required to support them and to help meet their needs,” Mersky said.
Partnerships that extend reach
Over the past decade, ICFW has built sustained partnerships across Wisconsin to expand its impact.
These include long-standing collaborations Mersky and Janczewski have forged with the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families and the Wisconsin Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board to evaluate home visiting programs and Family Resource Centers. Those centers and home visiting programs support thousands of families across the state each year, providing vital services and resources that have been shown to reduce the risk of child maltreatment.
The institute also partners with community-based organizations such as the Sojourner Family Peace Center and Lutheran Social Services of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan on initiatives related to domestic violence and school-based mental health.
These partnerships are central to the institute’s model, which aims to ensure that research is informed by practice and that innovations are grounded in community needs.
In recent years, ICFW has expanded into multimedia resources, too. Spearheaded by McGaughey and Waldo, the “Overloaded: Understanding Neglect” podcast has interviewed countless influential researchers and professionals active in the industry.
“With a team that has decades of experience running child welfare programs, researching and delivering their intervention and services, and analyzing their data, we knew that there were too many families that had been failed by our systems, and that there were opportunities to support families earlier to lessen the weight of stress on their lives,” Waldo said.
“Consequently, we have shifted our focus to building a community focused on collaboratively pursuing policies and practices that support overloaded families and address systemic failings. This shift has yielded constructive relationships, conversations and knowledge sharing with partners from across our state and country.”
Looking ahead
Today, the partnership between Children’s Wisconsin and UWM remains at the core of ICFW’s work.
Increasingly, that work is focused upstream by addressing the conditions that place families at risk before they enter the child welfare system. Initiatives such as Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities reflect this shift toward prevention and sustainable well-being.
“What we’ve built together was leading-edge when we started,” McGaughey said. “It’s a model that’s needed now more than ever.”
Over the past 10 years, the Institute for Child and Family Well-Being has demonstrated the value of combining academic research with community partnership.
By focusing on real-world implementation, sustained collaboration, and systems change, ICFW has expanded access to effective services and improved outcomes for children and families across Wisconsin.
On Oct. 1, the ICFW plans to host an event to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its founding. Attendees will include community partners, civic leaders and agency administrators from local, state and national organizations.
As it enters its second decade, the institute continues to build on that foundation — working toward a future where well-being is not an afterthought, but a central goal.
