This paper chronicles the exploration and development of a residential program of the child welfare authority of Renfrew County in Ontario, Canada. Recognizing that virtually its entire population of youth in care was failing to achieve positive outcomes in education, Renfrew County Family and Children Services embarked on a program development…

Training is widely believed to be an important element in promoting good child welfare practice. Scholarly attention to training, however, has been limited. To facilitate further development of child welfare training, in this article, we discuss the importance of conceptualization in the design and evaluation of training projects, offer a…

The lack of culturally appropriate health and mental health care has contributed to the large number of African American youth and families involved in the child welfare system. This article reviews the consequences of the insufficient access to culturally sensitive, evidence-supported interventions for African American foster youth. The authors…

Describes a program developed by the Children's Aid Society of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, called Intergenerational Support System (ISS), in which senior volunteers serve as support persons for problem families. (SAK)

Articulates how the family support movement emerged in the last 20 years, and describes the philosophical premises, principles, and practices that currently guide it. Considers the inability of current family support program typologies to guide outcome evaluations, and introduces a typology that deconstructs family support programs into their…

Examines the concept and application of prevention programs in the child welfare services, and provides a framework for child welfare services based on the public health model of prevention, which focuses on helping program administrators identify and plan services and programs for target populations at different stages in their development. (CM)

Steps in establishing a community-supported foster group home are described. Efforts to begin the group home, now in its fifth year of existence, included community education, community organization, and work with individual community members. (Author/DB)

Presents basic concepts and techniques for developing an effective, supportive program for supervising child care workers in residential facilities. (CM)

Matching Needs and Services (MNS) is a practice tool intended to help people who work with vulnerable children use rigorously assembled information on needs as a guide to design, implement, and evaluate more-effective services. To do this, MNS focuses on needs but links them to outcomes and thresholds before dealing with the services to achieve…

This article offers a framework for training child welfare workers and supervisors to stop and prevent foster care drift and to achieve permanency goals. (Author/DB)

Describes a residential treatment program for emotionally disturbed children which used a computerized method for cross-confirming information about the functioning of children. (CM)

Demonstrates how one community family life education agency deals with pressures for and against sex education, describing the agency's philosophy and curriculum and providing suggestions for strategic planning. (MP)

Suggests a framework for a family-centered residential group care model for children in acute crisis. The model aims at achieving a permanent discharge for the children as soon as possible. (CM)

Describes a workshop which focused on preparing adults for a family life education program in their community. (CM)