Lessons From a Foundation’s Work to Prevent Child Abuse

Community Partnerships for Protecting Children: Lessons, Opportunities, and Challenges, a report from the Center for Community Partnerships in Child Welfare and the Center for the Study of Social Policy, shares the results of an effort by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation to combat child abuse and neglect. It began in 1995 in low-income neighborhoods in four cities. The “community partnerships” are tailored to each site, but the programs share four basic elements: consulting families to develop “individualized courses of action” to keep children safe; overhauling the child-welfare bureaucracy; building strong community networks; and collaborating with community leaders to determine where resources should be directed. The report describes the initial hypotheses of the project, what succeeded and what did not, and how each site adjusted over time, concluding with a discussion of lessons from the pilot projects.

Publisher: Center for the Study of Social Policy, 1575 I Street, N.W., Suite 500, Washington, D.C. 20005; (202) 371-1565; fax (202) 371-1472; http://www.cssp.org; 36 pages; available free by contacting the publisher.