A Guide to Responding to Microaggressions
This article discusses how different types of microaggressions affect people’s lives and provides a hands-on guide to strategies, approaches, and interventions to address microaggressions.
A Social Worker's Tool Kit for Working with Immigrant Families - A Child Welfare Flowchart
The flowchart illustrates how and when immigration issues may arise during the chronology of a child welfare case, beginning at the point of a child abuse report and continuing through assessment, diversion or intervention, removal, dependency issues and permanency planning.
Activity to Explore the Impact of Skin Color
This document guides an activity that illustrates the different experiences participants may have based on the color of their skin and helps provoke thinking and dialogue about different experiences and perceptions.
Addressing Racial Disproportionality in Child Welfare
This issue brief explores efforts to address racial disproportionality in child welfare by focusing on changes in policy and practice at specific decision points in the child welfare process—prevention, reporting, investigation, service provision, out-of-home care, and permanency—as well as policies and practices that can be implemented across several or all of these decision points. The issue brief is designed to help administrators, program managers, and policymakers explore solutions to racial disproportionality in their own child welfare systems. Specific examples of State and local projects that address disproportionality are highlighted throughout.
All Children-All Families Benchmarks of LGBT Cultural Competency
This one-page document offers ten benchmarks or steps that agencies need to achieve to be designated “Leaders in Supporting and Serving LGBT Youth & Families” and awarded the Seal of Recognition.
Biases: NCWWI 1-Page Summary
This document describes the biases that can create barriers to organizational change and gives pointed recommendations for confronting and changing institutionalized racism and biases in the organization.
Best Practices Guide for Working with Families from Refugee Backgrounds in Child Welfare
This guide is an overview of selected topics that are relevant to providing culturally responsive services to families with refugee backgrounds and understanding their unique needs.
Building a Culturally Responsive Workforce: The Texas Model for Undoing Disproportionality & Disparities in Child Welfare
This session, the eighth session in What Works for the Workforce: Leadership Competencies in Action –highlights a collection of strategies for building a culturally responsive workforce based upon the Texas Model for Addressing Disproportionality & Disparities, a framework that encompasses (1) data-driven strategies; (2) leadership development; (3) culturally competent workforce development; (4) community engagement; (5) cross-systems collaboration; (6) comprehensive training systems defined by anti-racist principles; and (7) a systems-wide understanding of the history of institutional racism and its impact.
Child Welfare Information Gateway: Cultural Competence
This webpage provides resources to help workers, agencies, and systems better understand and enhance their cultural competence, including information on working with children, youth, and families; disproportional representation of minority groups in the child welfare system; culturally competent services; training for child welfare staff; and the specific role of cultural competence in child maltreatment, out-of-home care, and adoption.
Child Welfare’s Response to Diversity (North Carolina)
This issue of Practice Notes discusses the growing racial and ethnic diversity of the United States and subsequent challenges for the child welfare system by listing the principles that guide North Carolina's provision of family-centered services.
Cultural Resources for Practitioners
This document provides child welfare practitioners a list of resources and learning opportunities that focus on cultural issues and specific populations, raise awareness and promote critical thinking about cultural issues common to child welfare practice.
Cultural Humility
This 30-minute documentary explains what cultural humility is and why we need it, and describes a set of principles that guide the thinking, behavior and actions of individuals and institutions to positively affect interpersonal relationships as well as systems change.
Cultural Humility and Management in Child Welfare
This webinar discusses culture, multiculturalism, intersectionality and how cultural humility connects to cultural competence and contributes to cultural responsiveness. It includes a video case example and discussion on how to apply the concepts to agency practice.
Cultural Humility in Child Welfare Practice
This webcast provides a case-based, self-reflective and interactive training curriculum, helping child welfare staff to learn from the diverse people with whom they work, reserve judgment, and bridge the cultural divide between perspectives in order to develop and maintain mutual respect and a collaborative working relationship.
Cultural Humility Practice Principles
This 1-page summary lists 10 practice principles for cultural humility.
Culturally Competent Practice with Latino Children and Families (Instructor Manual)
This training curriculum is designed to child[WU1] protection staff on culturally competent practice with Latino children and families by building competency for work with this population using a Systems of Care model.
Culturally Competent Practice with Latino Families (Georgia)
This training curricula provides participants with an introduction to the basic concepts of culturally competent practice, and specific skills and knowledge for culturally competent practice with Latino families.
Culturally Responsive Child Welfare Practice - CW360
This issue explores cultural responsiveness and concepts related to culturally informed practice, features an expanded practice section focusing on innovative, community developed practices, presents articles from child welfare stakeholders on practice implementation and the personal impact of addressing culture in child welfare work, and offers tools and information to help professionals apply the concepts in their own work settings.
Culturally Responsive Child Welfare Practice - CW360 Integrated Bibliography
This bibliography offers an extensive list of resources dealing with Cultural Responsive Child Welfare Practice.
Cultural Responsiveness
Resources to help workers, agencies, and systems better understand and enhance their cultural competence. Includes information on working with children, youth, and families; disproportional representation of minority groups in the child welfare system; culturally competent services; training for child welfare staff; and the specific role of cultural competence in child maltreatment, out-of-home care, and adoption.
Dismantling Racial Inequity #2: Community Collaboration and Grassroots Effort
This webinar is the second session of "Dismantling Racial Inequity Through Child Welfare Systems Change" webinar series and highlights the partnership between Iowa Department of Human Services and Native American community representatives and their efforts to address the overrepresentation of Native American children in the Woodbury County child welfare system.
Dismantling Racial Inequity #4: Slow and Steady Wins the RACE of Child Welfare Equity
This webinar is the fourth session of "Dismantling Racial Inequity Through Child Welfare Systems Change" webinar series and focuses on DCF's work related to agency and workforce development, as well as sustainability The team shares their experiences on what it seems to take to keep the work of racial justice in the forefront, in the background, and at all levels—in ways that ultimately impact children, families, and communities.
Diverse Populations and Communities
Child welfare professionals across the country work with children, youth, and families from varied backgrounds and communities with their own unique strengths, needs, and challenges. Resources in this section provide information about and skills for working with diverse populations to help child welfare professionals engage families, make appropriate case decisions, improve outcomes, and serve the best interests of children, youth, and families.
Family Reunification Among Mexican and Vietnamese Immigrant Children in the Child Welfare System: Toward an Understanding of Promising Practices to Improve Service Availability and Effectiveness
This study examines family reunification among Mexican and Vietnamese immigrant and non-immigrant children and identifies promising practices to improve service availability and effectiveness.
FRIENDS National Resource Center for Community-Based Child Abuse Prevention: Cultural Responsiveness
This webpage provides training tools on cultural responsiveness and offer a basic framework for stimulating discussion about: (a) what is meant by cultural responsiveness and why it is important, (b) how to evaluate individual and organizational cultural responsiveness, and (c) how to begin to develop cultural responsiveness and create a culturally specific approach to ensure ongoing success.
How to Overcome Bias
A handout created for the Understanding Bias tool (listed below) that serves as a quick reference.
Immigration and Language Guidelines for Child Welfare Staff, 2nd edition
This booklet offers an overview of immigration and language issues to best serve the child welfare issues for the New York City's immigrant community.
Implicit Bias 101: Exploring Implicit Bias in Child Welfare
4 online modules covering the basics of implicit bias, implications in child welfare, self-reflection, and mitigating unwanted biases. The purpose of inSight is to provide child protection workers, supervisors, and managers with the knowledge and skills to address implicit racial bias in investigation and decision making processes.
Information Packet Cultural Sensitivity with Immigrant Families and Their Children
This document provides basic information on incorporating cultural sensitivity in interventions with immigrant families and children.
Indian Child Welfare Resources from the National Conference of State Legislatures
This webpage provides resources about Indian Child Welfare Act, including background, basic provisions, federal guidance and courts, and general information regarding child welfare in Indian country, including trauma-informed care, relative caregivers, and social services among urban AI/AN populations.
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning (LGBTQ) Youth in the Child Welfare System
This training course assists child welfare professionals in being aware of the needs of youth who identify as LGBTQ in their programs, and how to address those needs.
Microaggressions: NCWWI 1-page Summary
This document summarizes an article that evaluates microaggressions and proposes possible approaches to handling situations in which microaggressions occur. The authors delve into real-life experiences that they endured from the unique perspective of three different roles: witness, perpetrator, and target.
Microaggressions in the Child Welfare Workplace: NCWWI 1-page Summary
This resource summarizes the qualitative responses on the topic of microaggressions in the workplace from 30 social workers who identified as people of color. The authors asked about staff interactions with clients, focusing on policies, practices, and beliefs.
Paying Attention to White Culture and Privilege: A Missing Link to Advancing Racial Equity
This article shares the authors'observations of patterns of behavior by whites and people of color as we have experienced them in their racial equity capacity building work.
Places to Watch: Promising Practices to Address Racial Disproportionality in Child Welfare
This report shares ten jurisdictions’ approaches to reducing racial disproportionality and disparities in their child welfare services in order to generate learning for—and give guidance to—others in the field.
Race Matters: Unequal Opportunity within the Child Welfare System
This brief explains why equal opportunity is important in the U.S. child welfare system, shows the consequences of unintended actions and presents tools and strategies to mitigate racial inequities.
Resources to Enhance Child Welfare Training Curricula for Staff Working with Refugees & Immigrants
This webpage, provided by Bridging Refugee Youth and Children’s Services (BRYCS), offers various books, reports, articles and presentations focusing on enhancing child welfare training curricula for staff working with refugee and immigrant children.
Resources for Child Welfare Professionals Working with Families from Refugee Backgrounds
This guide provides information and resources to assist child welfare workers in providing culturally responsive, appropriate services to meet the unique needs of families with refugee backgrounds. This resource guide includes specific resources for two of Minnesota’s newest refugee communities (Bhutan and Burma).
Responding to Microaggressions and Bias
This tool can be used to guide conversations about microaggressions.
Staff Retention in Child & Family Services: Working with Differences
This training aims to increase child and family service agencies' effectiveness in developing and retaining their staff by applying information from research and best retention practices.
The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) An Overview
This webinar provides an overview of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a federal law passed in 1978 in response to the alarmingly high number of Indian children being removed from their homes by both public and private agencies.
The Wakanheza Project™ Creating Welcoming Environments
This document provides principles and strategies that prevent or de-escalate stressful situations in public to create more welcoming environments for children, young people, families, and adults.
To Transform Child Welfare, Take Race Out of the Equation
In this eye-opening talk about the impact of race and neighborhood on foster-care decisions, social worker Jessica Pryce shares a promising solution to help child welfare agencies make bias-free assessments about when to remove children from their families. "Let's work together to build a system that wants to make families stronger instead of pulling them apart," Pryce says.
Twenty Things Supervisors Can Do to Support Workers to Competently Practice with LGBTQ Children, Youth, and Families
This document briefly highlights twenty ways that child welfare supervisors can support workers in practicing competently with LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning) children, youth, and families. It provides concrete tips that supervisors can utilize in their day-to-day work in order to provide supervision that helps workers to enhance their skills in practicing with LGBTQ children, youth, and families and to promote an LGBTQ-affirming agency environment.
Understanding and Addressing Racial/Ethnic Disproportionality in the Front End of the Child Welfare System
This executive summary examines the nature of disproportionality in the frontend of the child welfare system and the interventions designed to address it.
Understanding Bias
This online learning tool was designed for direct service workers – but has helpful tips for everyone to better understand and work to overcome biases.
Understanding Structural Racism Activity
This activity helps participants delve deeper in analyzing racism and start to learn how to use a structural racism lens. Many times, actions are focused on changing the personal beliefs without looking at the practices and procedures that contribute to the issue.
Working with Clients who are Immigrants a Guide for Connecticut DCF' Social Workers
This guide was designed for social workers in Connecticut but serves as an example that other states may wish to replicate. It includes sections on demographics, statuses and statistics, legislation regarding basic needs eligibility, the immigration experience, and more.
Working with Immigrant Children & Families, A Practice Model: Trainer’s Guide (Georgia)
This training helps social services staff address cultural and language barriers, provide culturally competent practices and service delivery, and engage the community.