Prevent Abuse and Neglect.

The Family First Act helps to prevent abuse and neglect by expanding the child welfare system’s focus and resources with supportive services that recognize the critical role families play in ensuring the safety and well-being of children.

● The Family First Act is the first major modernization of the child welfare system in decades, presenting an opportunity to respond to the specific needs of children, teens and families in crisis.

● Family First provides long-overdue federal investment in prevention services for children and families at risk of entering the foster care system. It supports evidence-based efforts for mental health, substance use prevention, treatment services and in-home parent skill-based services that narrows the number of children and families who enter the child welfare system, in part by targeting those at greatest risk.

● Family First will help more parents and their children grow up in a safe home and ensure that they have the support they need to address physical and emotional trauma. Similarly, support is available for parents who have a mental illness or who would benefit from in-home parenting services.

● Family First offers states and tribes access to additional federal funding which supports extended family members caring for chidren. Maintaining this critical familial bond helps ensure a child can build a foundation for future learning and health.

Transform Child Welfare.

The successful implementation of the Family First Act began in-earnest in October 2019. The transformation of the child welfare system still requires the active participation of everyone in the child welfare community, and we must all do our part to ensure we are transforming the system to meet the needs of our children and to support and strengthen families

● The Family First Act is an opportunity – but strong federal, state, tribal and local stakeholder collaboration is key to its success.

● Successful implementation requires engaging the advocates who pushed for passage of the Family First Act – young people, parents and relatives with first-hand experience in the foster care system. These constituents must be invited, consulted and meaningfully engaged as the law is implemented.

● We can all play a role in the successful implementation of the Family First Act:

Child welfare leaders and professionals need to bring their expertise and urgency to act back to their jurisdictions.

Public health and mental health professionals should be prepared to participate, adapt and offer insight into how to design a system that best serves children and families.

Courts and the judiciary system need to listen and adapt best practices to protect vulnerable youth, and keep families together.

Policymakers should be prepared to collaborate on solutions that modernize child welfare services. 

Advocates, businesses, nonprofits and local leaders all must raise their hands and engage to truly transform child welfare in their communities.

Funds for Strengthening Families.

The Family First Act is an opportunity to invest more resources in strengthening families and keeping children safe from harm, helping families remain together and when foster care is required, ensuring that children are placed in the least restrictive, most family-like setting appropriate to their needs.

● Family First marks a significant step toward strengthening families by providing jurisdictions with new federal resources for all families to access evidence-based support services such as addiction treatment, mental health services and parental skill-building that help children remain safely at home.

● Family First makes available, for the first time, significant federal dollars to states and tribes to address the root causes that are putting children in foster care. Before Family First, states and tribes could only use the bulk of federal child welfare investments for placing a child in foster care after they had suffered harm. This was the case despite research confirming a number of evidence-based interventions could help keep children safely with their own families.

● For children and teens who cannot remain at home with their parents, Family First offers additional support for evidence-based Kinship Navigator programs that links relative caregivers to a broad range of services and supports to help children remain safely with them.

● Family First emphasizes the importance of children being placed in the least restrictive, most family-like setting appropriate to a child’s needs, and when foster care is needed, Family First allows federal reimbursement for care in family-based settings.