Building a Culture of Family Strengthening
A maturity model helping child welfare agencies shift from reactive to proactive family support.
A practical, research-backed toolkit — staff survey, scoring template, recommendations, and facilitation guide — now helps child welfare agencies diagnose where they stand on family strengthening and build a roadmap for culture change, moving from a punitive, investigation-first posture toward one centered on supporting families before crisis hits. It's freely available to any agency.
The challenge
Child welfare agencies have traditionally operated from a "better safe than sorry" posture, but families are frequently reported for neglect that's really unaddressed poverty. Agency leaders wanted to reorient toward proactive support but lacked a practical way to assess their own readiness or plan next steps.
The project
Over about 16 months, the team ran four linked research efforts with San Diego County's Office of Child and Family Strengthening and five additional partner jurisdictions — Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, New York City, and Washington State — speaking with 160 participants: staff, families, community organizations, and subject matter experts.
In-person research with San Diego County, including home-visit observation and staff/community focus groups, surfaced four recurring barriers: agency processes that make it hard for workers to meaningfully engage families, limited community-resource awareness, low workforce capacity and psychological safety, and inconsistent leadership vision. These became the model's four pillars — leadership and vision, workforce support, community partnerships, and family engagement.
The team started out using "prevention" — standard child-welfare terminology — but changed it to "family strengthening" after hearing directly from families that "prevention" didn't reflect how they understood their own experience. Families don't seek out prevention services or associate the word with getting help. That kind of finding is exactly what a good research process should surface: not just what to build, but what to call it.
How the model works
The maturity model pairs a staff survey (available as fillable PDF, Google Form, Microsoft Form, or plain text) with a scoring template that maps results to maturity levels across the four pillars, plus tailored recommendations and a facilitation guide for turning results into a roadmap.