Child Welfare

A central goal of U.S. social welfare policy is to ensure that all children have the opportunity to reach their full potential as productive adults. Yet it is increasingly clear that where children live plays a central role in determining their life chances. This paper provides an overview of The Urban Institute's Program on Neighborhoods and Youth Development, which is dedicated to understanding the relationships between neighborhood-level factors and the well-being and development of children and youth and identifying and evaluating place-based, community-wide strategies to help children grow up to reach their full potential as adults.

Hispanics are the largest immigrant group in the United States and the largest ethnic minority group in the nation. One in five children in the U.S. has immigrant parents. These children face a range of challenges, often caught in their communities’ changing social, political, and economic forces.

Timothy Ross identifies the obstacles frustrating service coordination and details ways to strengthen the fragile web connecting the many systems involved in protecting foster youth. Child welfare agencies often have responsibility for a child when a family crisis arises, but not the authority or capacity to resolve it without cooperation from other government divisions. When complex systems and bureaucracies have overlapping jurisdiction, fine-tuned coordination is the exception and not the rule.

Too often, child welfare policy and the agencies responsible for it—offices that respond to child abuse and neglect, oversee foster care placements, and seek to reunite children with their parents or find adoptive families—are out of sight and out of mind except for fleeting moments of tragedy, such as a child's death. Yet this topic is crucial: many children come into contact with child welfare agencies each year, and far more live in highly vulnerable families with some of the same challenges and risks. Further, leaders' successes and failures dealing with these extraordinarily difficult issues hold lessons for other areas of public policy and agency reform.

As the director of the District of Columbia's Child and Family Services Agency, Olivia Golden led the turnaround of a troubled system. In her new book, Reforming Child Welfare, she draws on her expertise as a senior federal official, local administrator, and an academic to map out strategies for improving and revitalizing the last safety net for vulnerable children and families, the public child welfare system.