Administered by Evident Change in partnership with Social Current and the Children’s Trust Fund Alliance as part of a cooperative agreement with the Children’s Bureau, the Quality Improvement Center on Helplines and Hotlines has three goals.
- To support child protective services (CPS) agencies in their mission to protect children.
- To help mandated reporters, CPS hotline staff, and other community partners make more effective decisions, particularly in distinguishing families who require child protection intervention from families whose needs could be met through community-based services and support.
- To create an information hub for best practices and operations for community-based helplines to function as supportive resources for families with needs that do not require child protection intervention.
To address these goals, the Center will:
- Collect and share best practices for CPS hotline interviewing and assessment, particularly to ensure that all child safety concerns are appropriately investigated;
- Develop practical, evidence-based curricula to train mandated reporters and CPS hotline workers to make clear, quality decisions;
- Collect and create information about best practices for distinguishing families who require child protection intervention from families whose needs could be met through community-based services and support;
- Recruit and train pilot sites across the country to implement and test new strategies; and
- Conduct a rigorous evaluation of pilot sites and share findings nationally.
By working together, we can support CPS agencies and mandated reporters to protect children from harm, create better pathways to meet families’ needs, and ensure all children and families have the chance to thrive.