Weekly Wonk: The Map is Not The Territory
Plus ACF's New "Home for Every Child" Initiative...
From the Founder’s Desk
Welcome, Wonks, and I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving.
This week we have an excellent guest Deep Dive for you, from longtime advocate and policy expert Lynn Tiede.
I respect and appreciate the thoughtful and creative care Lynn brings to policy work, and her ability to inhabit “beginner’s mind” even after decades in this work.
Her piece examines the Family First Prevention Services Act, not as a dataset but as a gateway to enter the discussion about why policy-first reform keeps stalling.
We will need it as we all look ahead to the next era of child and family policy.
If your holiday travel listening skewed more toward holiday hits, don’t sleep on our most recent podcast with recent former ACYF Commissioner Rebecca Jones Gaston.
She unpacked the internal work of staying present and human in leadership within policy systems that routinely reward distance, and what it means for what’s ahead.
Special thanks to Binti for their foundational sponsorship of WonkCast.
Let’s get into it.
Weekly Wonk Deep Dive
Family First and the Limits of Policy-First Reform
By Lynn Tiede, Guest Contributor
Advocates and policymakers rely on federal policy as the main tool of reform.
At our best, we work alongside people impacted by child welfare to identify problems and brainstorm solutions.
But we default to the tools we know: funding levels, eligibility rules, and service arrays.
Federal policy is an important but blunt instrument, and in child welfare we can wield it without a shared definition of what success looks like for families.
Without that definition, reform drifts.
With that definition, we create change that matters.
Family First as a Case Study
The 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act was landmark legislation aimed at shifting financing to keep children safely with families through evidence-based services that can prevent unnecessary foster care.
Yet, more than seven years after passage, implementation remains narrow.
Many states and communities are still facing challenges getting Family First services to the families who need them.
ACF data show only 18,324 children had received Family First services through FY2023.1
Family First didn’t reveal a lack of demand. It revealed a structural misalignment between federal design and how support actually reaches families.
Why Uptake Stayed Small
There are many reasons for the slow uptake.
One of the most significant is that Family First requires multiple conditions to line up for a single family to access services, including:
Program Availability. A Family-First approved program must be available in a community and match their specific needs
Administrative Infrastructure. The provider must have a contract that allows Family-First billing, and
Eligibility. The family must meet the program’s eligibility rules
Even when all three align, the program may not be culturally, linguistically or developmentally aligned with the family and child.
Some agencies and providers are doing heavy lifting to make Family First viable for families, despite all the challenges.
But in many other communities, provider uptake can be slow.
Their hesitation is rational. They are reluctant to work with child welfare agencies because of significant implementation challenges including:
Misaligned practices and strategies for working with families
Many Family-First approved programs are designed for families to engage in voluntarily, yet child welfare agencies are used to mandating parental behavior as a condition of keeping or regaining custody of their children.
Ultimately, when the removal of your children is hanging in the balance, parents aren’t left with much of a choice.
Under these circumstances, some providers can’t or won’t engage.
Lack of sufficient support and funding to implement the services as designed
In order for states to receive federal reimbursement through Family First, their providers must meet the evidence-based program’s implementation standards, such as staffing, service delivery, training, and data collection requirements.
Despite federal funding being reliant on providers’ meeting program standards, states are not required to reimburse for the full cost of implementation.
In those cases, providers must find other public or private funding to fill in the gaps in order to be successful.
Concerns about over surveillance and sharing family data
An increasing number of states allow families to be referred to Family First services by community providers.
While this approach can help serve more families, it also means bringing families and their struggles to the attention and data systems of a child welfare agency that has the power to remove children.
When a family is referred from the child welfare agency, there can be concerns about ongoing requirements to share detailed family information that isn’t related to child safety.
Community-based providers, who have successfully supported families for years, face a tough tension: serve fewer families, or face more challenges and risks to the trust they establish with families.
Why Policy Stalls on the Ground
This isn’t about litigating the merits of Family First, though; it’s about a broader pattern: policy-first reform hits its limits fast.
First, very real structural challenges exist when translating policy into results for families.
Child welfare is a complex system of systems, whose funding streams are rigid because they were never originally designed to all flow in concert.
And it’s serving families facing complex challenges who have often been failed by other systems.
National advocates and policymakers understandably take a 20,000-foot view of problems and solutions, and then work to reform the system step by step, program by program, funding stream by funding stream.
Doing that without a design that is in service of an underlying vision is a recipe for drift.
There’s a reason that you design a building before asking the plumber and electrician to do whatever they think will work best.
In the end, significant limitations stall child welfare policy:
Success is defined in system terms, not family terms
Strategy is built around state and local compliance, not effectiveness.
Reform is piecemeal, with different constituencies and definitions of success for each child welfare-related program or funding stream.
In the case of Family First, success was defined as fewer children in out-of-home care. So federal design focused on:
Narrowly specifying what the system could offer families to keep them together;
Requiring that services and supports are ‘evidence-based’ and ‘trauma-informed’; and
Routing everything through a complex, eligibility-driven funding mechanism.
The problem is that federal policy handed states and communities tools that didn’t match the work they were already doing or the conditions that made support effective.
Family First policy prescribed the best thinking at the time – evidence based and trauma informed services.
But the overall policy approach lacked an understanding of what it takes for these strategies to be effective for families, and why.
Family First offered a conceptually simple, systems-focused solution to support families at one of the most difficult times in their lives.
It did this while also trying to move multiple systems at once that typically haven’t worked together for states or families.
This is not unique to Family First; any federal policy reform that emerges in this way faces this type of tension.
It’s why forethought and design toward a clear goal is essential.
Good intentions can’t overcome policy that is misaligned with family needs, community practice, agency tradeoffs, or the way support actually gets delivered.
It’s not surprising that friction becomes the default, not the exception.
Starting from Practice Instead
The complexity of the child welfare system and the challenges that families face can be overwhelming.
The quick default to policy fix is a logical one.
We see glimpses of progress. We keep going.
But what if we came down from the 20,000-foot view and spent more time learning and understanding what works for families and children? Could we do better?
This isn’t a wild new idea; just ask any business leader if they would roll out changes to their services based only on what the engineering or marketing teams think.
Where progress is happening, it’s because agencies and organizations design from the perspective of families, children and youth, not the architecture of federal programs or the most recent buzz words.
In their communities, people know good practice when they see it, and gravitate to those who are trusted and meet their needs.
For agencies and organizations doing this work, very real staffing, training, funding and systems support are required in order to be successful.
Federal policy can learn from and design around these lessons, and create the policy and financing tools that reinforce them. Right now though, it doesn’t.
The Map is Not The Territory
The problem is a classic confusion of the map and the territory.
Our federal policies are the map. They show what it all looks like from above, which is an essential view for orienting.
What’s happening in communities, though, is the territory.
The map might show you the shortest route, but it won’t know that a particular road has potholes or goes through an area with no cell service.
Each one of us knows the route near our neighborhood that looks logical, but that us locals never use. Policy is no different.
Where Are We Going?
But even with a cutting edge map and the best directions from a local, you’ll still get lost without a destination.
Child welfare reform means nothing if we don’t know what we’re working toward.
Taking a ground-level view can help us identify where we need to go next in our policy reform.
In the case of Family First, if we start from the perspectives of children and families, the design questions change completely:
For families who are struggling, how would we structure support to meet their varied and complex needs?
Who would deliver it, and under what conditions, to ensure success?
As a result, what would we fund, why, and how?
For child welfare as a whole, it means grappling with foundational questions like:
When abuse is suspected or confirmed, what should a child or youth experience, from a practical standpoint, and how can it lead to healing?
What should the foster care experience - from start to finish – look like for children and youth when mental, physical and relational health are prioritized?
Who are the right people to do this important work and how should they be trained and supported?
How do we hold ourselves accountable?
Debates over reforming, shrinking, or abolishing child welfare miss the core point: progress depends on redefining the system’s purpose and success through the eyes of families and practitioners.
Avoiding these questions leads to well-intentioned drift.
Answering these questions can help us engage practitioners and people who have been impacted by child welfare in substantive conversations about a vision for child welfare.
In the end, creating a shared vision can help us move away from piecemeal policy reform that is trying to fix ‘the system’.
It can help us create a more collective strategy that is grounded in creating, funding, and supporting strategies that result in families and children finding stability and healing from trauma.
Even as a blunt instrument, federal policy will be an important tool to help us do better by children and families.
A blunt instrument is most effective when we know exactly what we’re using it for and why.
Lynn Tiede is a consultant working with nonprofits, foundations and government agencies on policy, evaluation, and sustainability.
Wonkatizer
ACF’s Launches “Home for Every Child” Initiative
ACF has launched A Home for Every Child, the first signature initiative shaping the Trump Administration’s child welfare policy under Assistant Secretary Alex Adams.
What it is: A push to use data to measure states against the ambitious target of a 1:1 foster home–to–child ratio in every state.
Where it Came From: Using The Imprint’s Who Cares? data, ACF estimated national capacity is 57 homes (including kinship care, excluding institutions) per 100 children.
Why it Matters: This target is a broader tool than it seems at first glance.
You can think of homes for foster care placements as supply, which of course invites policies that would increase:
Foster parent recruitment and retention;
Kinship placement and support;
Reducing use of institutional placements & other non-family settings, like hotels.
But the metric would equally accommodate policy strategies aimed at changing demand for foster homes in the first place, including:
Supports to prevent family crisis;
Prevention of unnecessary foster care placement;
More timely reunification where appropriate;
Expanded and quicker permanency, including guardianship and adoption.
ACF is also promising broad state flexibility, streamlined licensing, and alignment with the President’s recent foster care executive order.
What to Watch Next: The details here will really matter, both in defining the metric and supporting states in the strategies they select to drive toward the target.
This has all the makings of a unifying theory for what comes next; expect this to be the start of a broader federal strategy, not the final end in itself.
That’s it for today.
Stay sharp, Wonks.
~Z
Partners Making Your Weekly Wonk Possible
