The Prevention Initiative Demonstration Project, funded by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), is a community-specific strategy delivered through eight regional networks designed to address the full spectrum of community-based prevention. This article summarizes a strong and meaningful pattern of improvements…

With Washington trapped in budget battles and partisan gridlock, cities have emerged as the best source of government innovation. Nowhere is this more visible than in New York City. Since taking office in 2002, Mayor Bloomberg has introduced a steady stream of innovative policies, from a competition to recruit a new applied sciences campus and a…

This paper describes an innovative service delivery model to reduce the number of children entering the child welfare system. Point of Engagement (POE) is a collaborative family- and community-centered approach initiated in Compton, a regional office in Los Angeles County that serves south Los Angeles, a predominantly African American and…

School districts are central players in the child care delivery system: they operate a mix of child care centers and programs, serve a range of children of different ages, and fund their programs from a variety of federal, state, and local sources. This report provides a range of programmatic and fiscal information about the federal and state…

Prominent among the new models of social service delivery are organizations providing comprehensive, community-based supports and services (CCBSS) to children and their families. A needs analysis explored CCBSS sites' interest in and readiness to use a software tool designed to help them make more effective internal resource allocation decisions…

This paper reviews literature on the support needed by families of infants in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). A survey of 94 California NICUs indicated that they generally provide comprehensive services to families while infants are in the hospital, less service during the transition home, and very little support and follow-up after the…

The case studies contained in this document were developed as part of a national project to identify communities that have made substantial progress toward developing comprehensive, coordinated, community-based systems of care for children and adolescents with serious emotional disturbances and their families. After initial identification,…

This study examines the involvement of 462 teachers in school-linked service efforts (such as provision of medical care, parenting education, and counseling at the school site) in 77 schools throughout California. The survey found that the teachers participated in an average of 2.7 types of training activities concerning school-linked services.…

State and county initiatives in California have sparked a movement for integration of social services. The practical lessons learned by communities integrating services for children and families were studied and are presented in this report. The study draws on the experiences of seven California communities (Fresno County, Los Angeles County,…

This report presents case studies from seven states showing how state governments are: (1) responding to demands for more efficient and effective delivery of children's services; (2) taking on additional responsibilities formerly handled at the federal level; and (3) passing on added responsibilities to the local level (school districts, local…

Profiles are presented of each of the 10 consortia that make up the California Health Services/Education Activities (HS/EA) network (new relationships between educational facilities where health care manpower is trained in the community settings where they practice). The first part of the booklet is a comparative analysis of (1) Area Health…