A Better Way To Help Children and Families
The Community Response Guide is a practical tool designed to help local residents take ownership of supporting families.
Who Benefits from the Guide?
The Community Response Guide is a real-time resource that helps mandated reporters and community members make sound decisions and consider local options to help families receive the most appropriate support. The tool encourages the philosophy that even when a report is needed, families can also be supported by the community.
The guide delivers benefits at all levels.
- Mandated reporters gain clear guidance and practical tools to support confident, accurate decision making.
- Families get appropriate help for their needs, which in turn can help decrease rates of child maltreatment.
- Local service providers and community partners are recognized as primary preventive agents, helping families early and potentially reducing involvement in the child welfare system.
- Child protective services (CPS) agencies are better able to focus on legitimate safety concerns, not need-related cases that require community support rather than legal action.
- Communities have better resources to care for their members, strengthening local capacity.
By connecting you to local resources and helping you evaluate your concerns with confidence, the Community Response Guide supports appropriate use of CPS resources, supports family stability, and helps keep children safer.
An Innovative Pathway to Community Support
When a family has needs but the situation does not meet standards for a report to child protection, the Community Response Guide helps you easily connect a family with supportive services. The guide offers this support through the community support pathways.
A community support pathway aims to:
- Support mandated reporters, child-serving professionals, and community members in understanding their role in supporting child safety outside the statutory child protection system.
- Ensure that families or child-serving professionals who seek access to culturally relevant and effective prevention services can be connected to local services within their community, thereby preventing an unnecessary report to child protection whenever possible.
- Support entry to reliable networks of support for families to develop and sustain long-term family well-being and child safety within their communities.
About Evident Change
Evident Change is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that uses data and research to improve our social systems. We believe our systems should help people achieve their greatest potential, not create barriers to their success.