What Strategies Will We Adopt?
We believe families want to do what is best for their children, but often need some form of support to make it happen.
PEI’s strategies are rooted in the understanding that families have primary responsibility for creating a safe and nurturing environment for their children and that almost all families want to do what is best for their children but may need some form of support to make it happen. By applying a comprehensive public health approach to the work supported by PEI, we underscore the importance of strong, integrated, and collective responsibility and coordination across agencies and within communities.
In order to make measurable progress on the plan’s seven objectives over the next five years, PEI will adopt the following strategies as part of a holistic approach to child abuse and neglect prevention. The strategies are intentionally broadly stated to allow for continued partnership and collaboration over the next five years to identify and adopt aligned activities that will meaningfully meet the needs of Texas communities.
Each strategy is presented under the single objective it was intended to have the most impact on. However, we recognize that many of the following strategies will have a positive and direct effect on other objectives presented in this plan.
Our Objectives
Incorporate Parent and Youth Voice
- Build off of the Children’s Trust Fund Alliance Parent Partnership Pilot to continue incorporating lived experience as crucial components of PEI’s existing and future initiatives and overall prevention strategy.
- Explore the creation of a statewide Parent Advisory Committee for prevention efforts and guidance for local Parent Advisory Committees.
- Invest in innovative, consistent ways to engage youth and families and to receive feedback from youth, parents, and caregivers.
- Actively seek to include youth, parents, clients, and community members in state and local prevention planning efforts.
- Create engagement options to include youth and parents in PEI’s outreach and communications efforts, hiring and recruitment strategies, procurement and budgeting efforts, and investment and resource allocation decisions.
Maximize Investments in Prevention
- Maximize the impact of current investments and seek additional resources to serve more children, youth, and families and strengthen communities.
- Use community maltreatment risk maps to scale and grow prevention programs and target limited resources to highest risk Texas communities.
- Provide continued professional development to PEI employees to support the development of skills for excellent grant oversight and the expertise to support success in all prevention programs and efforts.
- Explore options for financing and contracting for prevention efforts, including blended and braided funding, outcomes-based and performance-based contracting, and quality incentives.
Utilize Research to Inform the Most Effective Prevention Strategies
- Improve program implementation, create efficiencies, and direct program funding toward the most effective programs to better meet families’ needs.
- Learn from the documented efforts of other communities and demonstration projects to maximize the impact of each dollar spent.
- Incorporate the principles of implementation science to support the application and delivery of services.
- Review data on a regular basis to support effective program implementation and contract compliance.
- Measure and report on the effectiveness of prevention programs on an annual basis and make timely course corrections based on available data.
- Utilize partnerships with independent research organizations to evaluate PEI programs.
- Continue data-matching and epidemiological studies of child maltreatment through collaborations with the Department of State Health Services and current projects like the Safe Babies project through The University of Texas that aims to develop a strong evidence base that lead to wide-scale implementation of education that supports positive parenting and provides tools to help parents cope with the difficult aspects of caring for an infant.
- Share best practices with grantees and provide technical assistance in program implementation, including support for model fidelity and disseminating research findings funded by PEI as well as best practices and innovative work from other sources.
- Utilize research and data to develop a precision approach to identifying modalities and interventions most likely to successfully address specific needs and priorities.
- Promote quality standards for providers of prevention programs.
- Refine current strategies for measuring service quality, fidelity, outcomes, and data for continuous quality improvement.
- Review and evaluate long-term and emerging trends through the Office of Child Safety, as well as current community and programmatic needs related to preventing child maltreatment, child maltreatment fatalities and near fatalities, in order to promote and support child safety at the local and state levels.
Utilize a Public Health Framework to Bring Precision to Prevention Efforts
- Support prevention efforts in strengthening all families in Texas communities using a public health framework and a two generation approach.
- Explore how families access services and how systems support families to maximize PEI’s available resources.
- Infuse the protective factors and social determinants of health, with a specific focus on racial inequities, as components of our existing and future prevention initiatives.
- Provide trainings to create opportunities for partnership with families and to provide tools for early support to grantees.
- Establish PEI as a statewide hub for communication, knowledge sharing, and assistance for stakeholders engaged in strengthening children and families in their communities.
- Utilize universal public awareness initiatives, strategies, and campaigns that promote child safety, address common parenting stressors, and connect families to services to help normalize the challenges of parenting and encourage seeking help.
- Use the Prevention Framework Workgroup, or other future iterations, to help inform Texas’s prevention strategy. See Appendix B in the Strategic Plan for a list of workgroup members.
- Explore replicating the Prevention Framework Workgroup at the local level to support local efforts to create a community-based prevention strategy.
- Promote the use of evidence-based, evidence-informed, and promising practices based on communities’ specific needs and desired outcomes.
Promote Equitable Access for all Texas Children and their Families
- Promote equitable access to PEI’s community-based prevention programs.
- Use the community child maltreatment risk maps to explore and leverage alternative methods of engaging families and to enhance local supports available in communities by best matching families’ needs with evidence-informed programs.
- Disaggregate prevention data to understand who is seeking services in Texas and the factors that lead them to seek support.
- Work with prevention grantees to promote access to prevention programs.
- Address identified geographic-based inequities in resource allocation and service delivery.
Address the Root Causes of Family Vulnerability
- Promote state and community-driven efforts to address the root causes of family vulnerability and make systemic improvements in the environments where children, youth, and families live, learn, work, and play.
- Provide flexibility when appropriate with the use of virtual technology and telehealth supports to allow for comprehensive, whole family approaches in enhancing individual and family resiliency.
- Promote strategies to ensure families can quickly recover from natural disasters and public health crises.
- Shape social norms around positive parenting and family help-seeking in times of need (e.g., public awareness campaigns).
- Promote public policies and practices that are broadly supportive of children and caregivers, including those addressing father engagement and nontraditional families.
Support Effective Cross-Sector, State-to-Local, and Faith-Based Collaborations
- Collaborate across DFPS divisions and with partners across the state working with similar populations to promote flexible, proactive, and integrated service delivery systems to keep families together and children safely at home and to reduce child welfare involvement.
- Expand local collaborations and advocacy across sectors (nonprofit, government, faith, business) aimed at strengthening families, developing solutions to local challenges, and identifying champions for promoting prevention policies.
- Continue the efforts of the PEI-led early childhood systems-integration group to identify, coordinate, and integrate cross-sector initiatives for young children and their families.
- Identify systems families interact with and opportunities to coordinate and support help-seeking behavior by encouraging community-level partnerships.
- Leverage state, county, and community networks to strengthen supports, programs, practices, and policies that champion quality family support efforts.
- Provide navigation support to families to ensure they can effectively access the most needed services for them and their children.
- Elevate early brain development and pediatric brain health as critical areas of focus and crucial pillars of child health.
- Build on internal partnerships with the Faith-Based and Community Engagement team to advance prevention strategies that support families through the faith community.
- Identify gaps, test usability, and develop tools to support the use of PEI’s Community Toolkit in supporting a collaborative approach to developing strategies that align the prevention of child maltreatment and the promotion of positive outcomes for Texas children, youth, and families.