Journal of Public Child Welfare

Implementing “A Home for Every Child”: State and Territorial Strategies, Evidence, and Lessons

The Journal of Public Child Welfare invites manuscripts examining how states and territories are implementing the Administration for Children and Families’ “A Home for Every Child” initiative. The initiative seeks to work on both sides of the child welfare system: reducing the number of children entering foster care through prevention and permanency efforts while increasing the availability, recruitment, retention, and effective use of foster and kinship homes.

This special issue will generate knowledge about how jurisdictions translate these priorities into policy, programs, administrative practice, workforce strategies, and system reform. We welcome scholarship that examines implementation processes, variation across jurisdictions, evidence of impact, implementation barriers, unintended consequences, and implications for children, youth, parents, caregivers, and child welfare professionals.

Of special interest are manuscripts co-authored by researchers and public child welfare authorities (state, county, tribal).

This Special Issue is a partnership between the Journal of Public Child Welfare and the U.S. Children’s Bureau and will be published open access to ensure state, county, and tribal child welfare leaders can benefit from this knowledge exchange. 

Of particular interest are manuscripts that:

• Analyze state or territorial strategies to reduce foster care entry through prevention, family support, and community-based services.
• Examine foster parent recruitment, licensing, reimbursement, support, and retention strategies.
• Study kinship care policies and practices, including kin-specific licensing, expanded definitions of kin, financial and service supports, and permanency outcomes.
• Address placement capacity and permanency for high-acuity youth and youth with complex behavioral health needs, including specialized placement models and cross-system coordination.
• Examine caseworker recruitment, retention, supervision, workload, burnout, and worker well-being as implementation conditions.
• Assess how states are using data, dashboards, scorecards, administrative data, or other analytic tools to plan, monitor, and improve implementation.
• Examine past child welfare system-wide practices that contributed to states’ status on AHFEC scorecard.
• Analyze the role of technology, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, or information-system modernization in recruitment, matching, placement, prevention, or permanency decision-making.
• Examine reforms to federal and state oversight, including Child and Family Services Reviews, Program Improvement Plans, and efforts to reduce administrative burden while strengthening accountability.
• Compare implementation across states, territories, Tribes, counties, or local jurisdictions, including the influence of legal, fiscal, political, geographic, and organizational contexts.
• Document the experiences and expertise of children, youth, parents, kin caregivers, foster caregivers, caseworkers, Tribal communities, and other people with lived experience.
• Address the impact and implications of implementation on sub-populations, including age, sex, racial, ethnic, Tribal, disability, geographic, socioeconomic, etc.
• Document partnerships among public child welfare agencies, behavioral health systems, courts, schools, health systems, Tribes, faith-based organizations, private providers, philanthropy, and community organizations.
• Identify promising practices, implementation failures, tradeoffs, and unintended consequences, including situations in which performance metrics may not capture family or child well-being.

We welcome empirical, mixed-methods, qualitative, comparative, implementation-science, evaluation, policy-analysis, and practice-based manuscripts. Articles may focus on a single jurisdiction or compare multiple jurisdictions. Studies of early implementation, ongoing reform, and established practices are encouraged. Submissions should distinguish clearly among the initiative’s stated goals, a jurisdiction’s implementation activities, and observed or anticipated outcomes.

Background links:

• A Home for Every Child
• Executive Order: Fostering the Future for American Children and Families
• Child and Family Services Review process
• Related commentary on Program Improvement Plans