Purpose and Scope
The purpose of this brief is to inform child welfare professionals about the work being done by the Child Welfare Capacity Building Collaborative (The Collaborative), which includes the Center for Courts, Center for States, and the Center for Tribes (Centers), to build the capacity of jurisdictions to integrate the voices of people with LE into child welfare system reform. The brief provides (1) a short overview of the CBC; (2) the methods used; (3) a review of how “lived experience” has been described and operationalized in existing research and resources; (4) how lived experience has been defined and incorporated into Center efforts to improve services; (5) approaches to integrate the challenges and recommendations into child welfare projects; and (6) opportunities for incorporating lived experience into projects.
Given the differences in how jurisdictions operationalized the concept of lived experience, it is important to develop a clear but comprehensive definition of what is meant by lived experience. For this brief, we will use a definition, based on a myriad of sources (Aparicio, 2017; Blakeslee & Walker, 2018; Callejas et al., 2021).
The Capacity Building Collaborative
In 2014, the Children’s Bureau formed the Capacity Building Collaborative (the Collaborative) (James Bell Associates & ICF, 2020). The Collaborative comprises three Capacity Building Centers (the Centers).
- The Center for States serves state and territorial Title IV-B and IV-E public child welfare agencies serving all 50 states and territories.
- The Center for Tribes serves Title IV-B and Title IV-E tribal child welfare agencies and organizations.
- The Center for Courts serves state and tribal Court Improvement Programs (CIPs).
The Centers develop and offer three types of services: universal, constituency, and tailored. Universal and constituency services are intended to build the capacity of professionals across multiple jurisdictions (James Bell Associates & ICF, 2020). Centers create content and disseminate information and materials that are broadly relevant to child welfare, tribal partners, and court professionals (universal services); they also generate content specific to the roles of different interested parties (e.g., peer groups and events designed for specialized roles) in the child welfare system (constituency services). Tailored services offer customized support to meet the unique capacity building needs of an individual state, tribe, or CIPs.
Methods
Qualitative methods were used to examine how the Centers incorporated LE into their capacity building initiatives. The following items describe how literature, materials, and information were identified and analyzed for this brief.
- Literature review. To gather background on the topic of LE, an initial online search for peer-reviewed literature yielded more than 120 articles that included terms related to lived experience.Twenty-one articles were identified as most relevant and reviewed individually.
- Selection of Center projects. To describe the work that the CBC has done with individual jurisdictions across the country, the study team identified Centers’ projects that included LE in some manner. Centers often engage in projects in jurisdictions that are tailored to the site and last from 1 month to several years, depending on the scope of the project. All Centers enter information about work conducted in jurisdictions into a searchable online data tracking system (CapTRACK). CapTRACK was developed by the Cross-Center Evaluation team to facilitate communication and evaluation (James Bell Associates & ICF, 2018). The study team used CapTRACK to identify 20 projects that focused on LE in various ways. Eight of these were eligible for inclusion in this brief.
- Facilitated discussions with Center staff. After projects were identified, the study team conducted six discussions with Center liaisons to confirm how the projects addressed LE and to what extent. Subsequent correspondence with Center directors provided additional information about how Centers built internal capacity to provide technical assistance related to LE.
- Document review. The study team used information from CapTRACK, the Centers’ written reports, and a review of the CBC website to incorporate additional details about relevant resources and activities focused across the three Centers.