The Healthy Families/Thriving Communities Collaborative Council (HFTCCC) brings together community leaders to create and sustain a District-wide network that empowers families and communities to improve their quality of life.

We are a 501(c) (3), organization that provides leadership, advocacy, resource development, technical assistance, and training to the six Healthy Families/Thriving Communities Collaboratives. The five Collaboratives are independent nonprofit organizations that operate across the District of Columbia in communities facing intergenerational economic, social and safety challenges. Since the mid 1990s, the Collaboratives supported by the Collaborative Council, have joined with community members – residents and institutions alike – to re-weave the social fabric. Each community solution is tailored to the needs of the community with Collaboratives and their partners offering a range of unique services and supports to children and families.

Committee on Human Services Reviews CFSA Progress
During the CFSA Oversight hearing on February 10, Human Services Committee Chairman Jim Graham outlined priorities for CFSA for the year ahead. Graham said that the agency needs to
• focus on ensuring the availability of service programs for youth aging out of foster care;
• increase child abuse and neglect early intervention and prevention efforts by increasing access to specialized services for at-risk youth and families;
• ensure that youth in CFSA care have access to mental health services; and
• increase kinship placement, including providing support for the grandparents caregiver program.

Graham also urged restoration in FY2013 of cuts that were made to the safety net in FY2012.

The Committee heard testimony from Judith Meltzer, deputy director director of the Center for the Study of Social Policy, the court-appointed monitor for the District’s child welfare system under LaShawn v. Gray, as well as representatives of a number of community-based organizations, including the Healthy Family/Thriving Community Collaboratives.

Meltzer’s testimony was based on the November 2011 monitoring report, which indicated that CFSA’s performance has improved over the reporting period between January through June 2011, but that overall performance is still not achieving the outcomes expected by the Court’s Order, the community or its own standards for practice. In closing, Meltzer said, “There is more to be done and the reform work is not complete, but as monitor, I am optimistic about the prospects for substantial and sustained progress to not only meet the goals of the LaShawn order, but to achieve quality outcomes for the District’s children, youth and families.”

Acting CFSA Director Brenda Donald attended the hearing, but it ended before she had the opportunity to testify. In her written statement, she said that the main challenges that the agency faces are “achieving reliable consistency of good practice, focusing on outcomes while continuing to comply with mandates, and exercising greater management oversight and accountability. Having come such a long way over the past few years, CFSA is well positioned to step up to this next level.”

Richard Flintrop, director of public policy and planning, HFTC Collaborative Council, who testified on behalf of the Collaborative Council and the Collaboratives, outlined several Collaborative concerns, including the following:

• The differential response program developed by CFSA is fundamentally flawed, it has failed to fully leverage the resources of the Collaboratives and other community partners, it seems designed to minimize opportunities to shift resources from CFSA staffing to the community, and does not reduce the involvement of CFSA in the lives of clients.

• In the aftermath of the Jacks-Fogle, although the Collaboratives have participated in daily screenings of new opened CPS cases to determine if families are in need of any crisis services that could be provided by the Collaboratives, only a small portion of all new cases have been referred. Flintrop suggested a comprehensive review of CPS be conducted with the goals of reducing new placements and improving services to families entering the system prior to completion of investigations.

• Under the Partnership for Community-Based Services, too few cases are being identified for teaming with the Collaboratives and CFSA is keeping cases open longer than necessary; there is little data collection and reporting from which program objectives can be measured; and there have been no opportunities for senior leadership of the agency and the Collaboratives to review program goals and objectives to discuss what is working and what isn’t and to develop an action plan to move toward a more integrated partnership that allows for more rapid safe closure and improved access to services and supports for families.

Flintrop also discussed three new Collaborative developments that “offer great opportunities to better meet the needs of children and families in the District of Columbia” as follows:

• The Far Southeast Family Strengthening Collaborative is providing services to families of 35 youth who had a history of truancy in middle school and were about to transition to high school, and had good success in engaging families, working with them to identify barriers to better school attendance and provide supports to address those barriers.

• The continuation of the Collaboratives’ Fatherhood, Education, Empowerment and Development Program, under a $4.6 million, three-year federal grant. The program will focus primarily on fathers of children already involved in one or more public agencies, and the increased financial and emotional supports that fathers will provide their families will reduce dependency on public systems.

• The Department of Human Services and the East River Family Strengthening Collaborative will test a new approach to serving birth parents who are involved with the child welfare system and are also close to being or have been sanctioned for noncompliance with TANF requirements. Under this new approach, parents who are not prepared to enter into workforce development activities due to stressors such as homelessness, unresolved mental health or substance abuse issues or pressures of parenting with limited resources, will be credited by the Economic Security Administration for family preservation and support activities they successfully participate in under a cross-agency family development plan.

In concluding his remarks, Flintrop said, “The good news is that there are many components of what could be a truly transformational approach already in place or about to begin. The real challenge going forward is to weave these treads into a whole cloth that breaks the cycle of dependency, supports family development and provides all the District’s children a more hopeful future. We are confident that with the leadership of Deputy Mayor Otero, David Berns and Brenda Donald, among others, and with the support of this committee, the Council and your community partners, we will see a sea of change in how the most vulnerable among us are strengthened.”