Kansas Families Are Benefiting from Family First Initiative

More than 3,000 children in Kansas who were at risk of being removed from their homes and placed in foster care are still living with their families, thanks in part to the wraparound support their families received from the Kansas Family First Prevention program.

Kansas was one of the first states in the country to implement the federal Family First Prevention Services Act, which allows states to use federal foster care funds for prevention programs geared toward keeping families together. The Kansas Family First Prevention program launched in 2019, focusing federal and state resources on mental health treatment, parent skill building, substance use prevention and assisting family members who serve as primary caregivers.

“…we are beginning to see significant results. We are seeing families stay intact, and we are seeing them improve in areas of parenting, mental health, well-being and substance use. That’s really exciting.”

Results are showing program’s impact

As interventions are put in place across the state, the big question on everyone’s mind is, are they working? Are the funds achieving their goal, to strengthen families and prevent their involvement in the child welfare system? A team of researchers from the KU School of Social Welfare and the KU Center for Public Partnerships and Research were tasked to find out. The KU team launched its rigorous, responsive and comprehensive Kansas Family First Prevention Service Evaluation in October 2020. Now, they have data to report back, and the news is good. Family First is having a positive impact on Kansas families.

Kaela Byers, Ph.D., associate research professor for the KU School of Social Welfare and principal investigator for the evaluation, says, “We have a little way to go in improving our data quality and understanding those impacts, but even with our careful interpretation, we are beginning to see significant results. We are seeing families stay intact, and we are seeing them improve in areas of parenting, mental health, well-being and substance use. That’s really exciting.”

Between October 2019 and February 2023, Family First made 3,898 referrals. The evaluation team found that during this period, the program met or exceeded its goals in two key areas. First, the evaluation showed that 88% of the children and youth who were referred for Family First services remained in their homes 12 months after that referral was made, instead of being removed from their homes and placed into foster care. This result was just shy of the program’s goal of 90%. Second, the evaluation revealed that just 5% of children and youth were placed in foster care during an open Family First case, which exceeds the program goal of fewer than 10% placed in foster care while receiving Family First services. In addition to helping keep families together, Family First programs are also showing a significant impact in improving child well-being, caregiver perceptions of their competency as a parent, and reduction in caregiver mental health symptoms and substance use.

Family First intervention expands

Family First will start a new grant period in July 2023, with a total investment of nearly $20 million to fund additional prevention services; increase the number of providers from 11 to 14; and fuel new substance use disorder services, parent skill-building partners and mental health services. The new programs include KVC Strengthening Families Program classes, Kansas Legal Services Parent Advocate Program, DCCCA Sobriety Treatment and Recovery Teams (START), and Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office Community Support Specialist Program.

“The program is not static; it’s changeable. And the state is continually assessing what the needs are, so the array of services that are available change over time,” Byers explains. “We are trying to understand both the individual services but also the impact of all of these services as a whole in terms of their collective impact on family well-being. As those services shift, and as our communities shift, we want to continually understand what these outcomes are to make sure we are achieving what we expect to achieve and that we are, in fact, helping families thrive.”

Putting data to work

The data collected by the KU team is a goldmine of information that is being used by state leaders, human service agencies and communities to inform their decision-making, helping them determine how to expand interventions that are working and improve those that are not meeting expectations.

“We shared these findings with DCF, the Kansas Family Council, Family First grantees, and with statewide and regional Interagency and Community Advisory Boards so all these decision makers and action bodies can understand the impact of our prevention service array. This promotes capacity for these partners to put those learnings into the context of their community in their local venues and conversations,” Byers says. “They help us make meaning of the data so we can collectively understand family well-being in the state and make systems changes to continually achieve better child, family, and community outcomes.”

For example, one group’s response to reviewing the evaluation data was to hold advocacy training for its members to better equip them to educate decision-makers on what families need. The Family First Family Council, which includes people with lived expertise with community and state social service systems, worked with the KU Center for Community Engagement and Collaboration within the School of Social Welfare to learn strategies for using personal stories in everyday interactions to advocate for community and system level changes to better support families. The Family Council forms its own advocacy agenda, engages in action, and further represents council priorities within the regional Interagency and Community Advisory Boards that were formed as part of the Kansas Strong for Children and Families initiative. The aim of these boards is to understand and strengthen the comprehensive community-based child and family support service array at the regional level. Family Council members serve as an important voice to drive the agenda and resulting action of the boards in their local regions across the state.

“We share these data with them so they have a rationale for the changes they are asking for. They can pair their experiences with hard data to ask for the changes they really want to see for the system,” Byers says.

While there will be mountains more data to parse in the coming months, and maybe even years, Byers and her team are excited about the effectiveness of the evaluation so far and for the initiative’s success.

“Three years into Family First, we are seeing families stay intact, and we are seeing them improve in the areas of parenting, mental health, well-being, and substance use,” Byers says. “We are eager to see the ongoing impact of this move upstream to support families to thrive together in their communities.”