Child Welfare
Give staff and supervisors the time they’d really like to spend on families.
Rising above the challenges
C!A® empowers child welfare agencies to transform their systems and regain the capacity needed to deliver vital services to children and families.
Today, workers often manage caseloads of 80–200 open cases – far beyond what’s sustainable or fair to the families they serve. Staff often don’t have the time they need to work with families to prevent removals or support children being turned over to the courts. This is what happens when constant crises and new cases take precedence in an overwhelmed system that leaves little room for meaningful engagement.
It’s also exactly the problem C!A was built to solve. We help child welfare agencies take control of the capacity crisis, leaving more time for what matters most.
Results worth celebrating
Our team blends experience in child welfare, process improvement, software development, and technology oversight into a seamless methodology that has helped states plan for, develop, and implement comprehensive child welfare information systems (CCWISs) and improve child welfare programs across the country. A key player in the nation’s first successful full CCWIS implementation, C!A now has played a critical role in helping child welfare programs in Idaho, Michigan, Indiana, Louisiana, and Missouri. Our child welfare partners have achieved impressive results, including:
45% reduction in subsequent substantiations and 65% fewer children returning into care
15%-20% reduction in kids in care
- Work more closely with families
- Improve on safety model
- Develop and support staff
From intake and assessment to ongoing services, permanency, and support for transitional youth, we can achieve lasting results, together. By implementing improved management systems, streamlined processes, and first-touch resolution techniques – designed with staff and supervisors who are at the heart of the action every day – we can strengthen every stage of the child welfare journey.
Solutions tailored to your needs
Our child welfare team is dedicated to helping kids and families thrive and meeting workers where they are. Each agency has unique challenges, so we identify your specific needs, goals, and barriers to collaborate with you – the people who know the work best – and come up with new processes that enhance capacity and work for everyone. This newfound capacity allows workers to refocus on children, better manage complexity, and improve consistent quality in their family-centric practice.
Accomplish a range of agency goals and objectives
Redesign business processes to achieve desired outcomes
Using our proven, capacity-building business process redesign approach, our team of experts will work with you and your team to create a service delivery model and processes that make sense for today’s agency. By streamlining your processes, you will eliminate unnecessary work that steals precious staff time and, in turn, reclaim staffing capacity within your existing operation, ensuring staff have the time they need to achieve the outcomes that matter most.
Business Process Redesign →
Leverage technology adoptions to maximize agency capacity
Preparing for a new CCWIS or any technology adoption is the perfect time to evaluate how you and your team perform work. We provide technology consulting services for a variety of contexts. For example, we partnered with Idaho to implement the nation’s first modern, fully integrated CCWIS, and in doing so helped them reduce the number of safety assessments taking over 30 days from 56% to under 5% and the average time to assess safety from 52 days to 14.
A partner who has been there and knows the work
C!A’s expertise in child welfare workloads and process redesign is directly linked to our staff’s years of experience. We have served in nearly every child welfare role, from safety assessment to case management, policy development to training, and local office supervisor to agency director. As such, our team has significant programmatic knowledge of the child welfare best practices needed to help you effectively meet the demands facing your agency today. Ready to unlock capacity in your child welfare program?
Bill Bott
Child Welfare Practice Lead & Director of Performance Improvement
Bill’s innovative approach has made him one of the nation’s most sought-after change agents and earned him the title of 2022 Government Thought Leader of the Year by the American Business Awards. Most of his 25+ years of public service experience have been dedicated to leading government improvement initiatives. As the C!A Director of Performance Improvement, he maintains consistency in BPR and supports improvements in capacity, most recently the child welfare improvement teams for Arizona, Utah, South Carolina, Idaho, and Indiana.
What if you could spend more time with families?
With BPR and supportive technology, caseworkers can finally focus on the best practice work they’re passionate about. They can sit with clients and call resources, hold family meetings to prevent removals, and spend extra time tracking down a resource that may be “the thing” that prevents a child from entering care. This also frees up supervisors to coach and mentor, ride along with staff, and provide the professional development that’s missed when everyone is in crisis mode. Workers rediscover job satisfaction, kids experience better outcomes, and fewer children unnecessarily enter foster care.
Read about our award-winning child welfare transformation projects:
Our approach for tackling the child welfare capacity crisis
As we work with child welfare agencies across the country, here’s what we’re learning.
C!A’s capacity building solutions for Child Welfare are currently implemented across 9 states and DC
Thought Leadership: Child Welfare
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