Get $3.5M+ to Boost Child Welfare Workforce & Outcomes

The published funding opportunity announcement has been modified to clarify the expected funding for all budget periods. Expected funding information for the 60-month project has been added to Section II, Federal Award Information, and Section IV.2, Project Budget and Budget Justification. This funding opportunity announcement has further been modified in Section IV.2, Table of Contents to require inclusion of a table of contents and in Section IV. 2, Third-Party Agreements to define third-party agreements and describe requirements.

Staff turnover has high fiscal costs to child welfare agencies and even higher human costs to the children and families served by those agencies. Continuous staff turnover negatively affects safety, permanency, and well-being outcomes for children and families by impacting the timeliness, continuity and quality of services. This emphasizes the importance of a systematic, continuous process for attention to workforce issues as an important mechanism for improved outcomes not only for worker recruitment and retention but also safety, permanency, and well-being for children and families. The purpose of this funding opportunity is to establish, by awarding a cooperative agreement, one Quality Improvement Center (QIC).

The purpose of the QIC is to conduct a multi-site demonstration project that will address pervasive workforce challenges in child welfare. This QIC will select or create and then test innovative and promising workforce improvement strategies to examine their effectiveness and utility in child welfare systems. The QIC’s goal is to demonstrate whether specific strategies improve recruitment and retention outcomes of state and tribal systems and to assess how outcomes for children and families are affected. The QIC will choose or develop replicable workforce interventions and then engage in partnerships with public child welfare agencies to implement and rigorously evaluate the strategies using standardized measures and common outcomes to allow for comparisons across sites.

Findings will be publicly disseminated. Outcomes will include: - Evidence-based strategies and interventions that when applied to identified workforce issues results in: - Improved worker recruitment and retention rates and worker satisfaction and intention-to-stay outcomes for agencies; - Improved agency culture and climate that supports worker recruitment and retention; - Improved child welfare practices related to safety, permanency, and well-being for children and families. - Workforce interventions that can be replicated in other child welfare systems. This is a 60-month project with five 12-month budget periods.

Year 1 will be funded at $1 million. It is expected that years 2-5 will be funded at $3.5 million for each year.