COVID-19 Workforce Needs Assessment (WNA): Cross-Site Report for Workforce Excellence Public Child Welfare Sites

U.S. public child welfare agencies are charged with ensuring the safety, permanency, and wellbeing of children, including the more than 400,000 children and youth in out-of-home placements at any given time. In 2018, the child welfare system responded to an estimated 4.3 million referrals
of abuse and neglect for almost 8 million children with 44% of these referrals leading to open cases for investigations (Administration on Children, Youth and Families [ACYF], 2020a). In March 2020,
the COVID-19 global pandemic resulted in the sudden mandated and prolonged closure of businesses, schools, and agencies across the country. Child welfare agencies were among those required to close their offices to protect the health and safety of their workforce. Due to the critical
and essential nature of child welfare work, agency leaders had to quickly work out how to deliver uninterrupted services to families, while moving their workforce (more than 30,000 caseworkers nationally; ACYF, 2020b) out of agency settings and into working remotely from their homes in a
matter of days. National Child Welfare Workforce Institute CLICK HERE