Keeping Families Safely Together

Family First Act with KVC Health Systems

Overview

All families can experience challenges related to parenting, illness, employment and income, substance abuse and/or the cycle of childhood adversity, abuse, and neglect. When families encounter struggles that are beyond their control or knowledge, it’s important that communities can offer supports and services to strengthen families and ensure the safety of children. Family preservation services help strengthen families and keep children safely at home rather than entering out-of-home care. Due to the Family First Act, more federal funding is now being directed towards interventions with families before any foster care is needed, preventing major disruptions in a child’s life and keeping a family strong and together.

KVC has a proven track record of keeping up to 98% of families safely together through in-home family strengthening services. This safely prevents children from entering foster care and prevents child and adult mental health needs from becoming crises. 

Family Preservation Services

Family preservation provides a path toward hope and healing through crisis management, in-home therapy and skill-building, and connecting family needs with community resources.

KVC helps families stay together using evidence-based interventions that are trauma-informed. Our family preservation services are focused on stabilizing the family, helping children remain safely in their homes, and improving the long-term wellbeing of both children and families.

KVC offers intensive in-home services provided by caring, trained staff who diligently match the level of intervention to the level of need in the family.

Learn more about our work in each state:

Family First Act 

Families deserve to stay together whenever safely possible. With family preservation services and new funding through the Family First Act, more families can stay together.

The Family First Act signed into law in February 2018 is the result of researchers informing policymakers about the positive outcomes families and communities experience when child welfare systems devote more resources to preventing the need for foster care.

Traditionally, resources are available to families who have had their children placed in foster care, but very few resources are available to strengthen families and prevent foster care. This legislation provides matching funding to states so they can increase family preservation services. By preventing removals of children from their homes, children and families can avoid the often damaging effects of long-term involvement in the child welfare system. KVC also emphasizes these preventative family preservation approaches because they are the right way to treat children and families facing challenges. The hope is that the Family First Prevention Services Act will inspire the allocation of more public dollars and resources to enable KVC and other providers to increase this important work.

In addition, KVC works to help state and federal policymakers to better understand and advocate for American families who face growing income inequality, lack of medical and healthcare access, the limited opportunities and resources for rural and inner-city citizens, and other challenges.

Learn more about our training and consulting here.

New call-to-action

Related articles: