Update by Kimberly Svevo
Our newly named Best Start for Families (BSFF) Department is excited and highly motivated to have joined the social services agency Lutheran Child and Families Services-of Illinois one year ago (officially Nov. 2023). We were eager to join this state-wide agency in order to share our Best Start (ICDP) Parenting / Parent Coaching Programs, our All About YOUth Programs and also our Professional and Community-Education Programs with LCFS client families and professional staff around the state. In our first year with LCFS we may have quadrupled the number of parents we are serving from the previous year.
The benefits of our programs to parents are transformative – increasing caregivers confidence, capacity, skills and knowledge – as well as their motivation to create protective relationships with their children, to help them thrive. We are thrilled to find LCFS colleagues in every region who have stepped up to partner with us to deliver Best Start parenting programs to their client parents – birth, and more recently, foster parents too.
The benefits of our LCFS staff training (of child welfare specialists and supervisors, as well as new clinicians) have been recognized and supported as providing new empathy and understanding of our clients. We appreciate the strong support and encouragement of all staff state-wide to partner with BSFF to strengthen outcomes for client parents and children.
I. STATISTICS: Total Birth Parent Referrals to BSFF July 2023-Oct 1, 2024. Note: our programs for the Child Welfare families – parents are 14 weeks long and youth programs are 12-14 weeks long:
- LCFS Child Welfare Total 247. Direct DCFS Contract Total: 58
- Grand Total 305, not including parents in partner programs.
- Completed Parent Groups: 92 Direct DCFS Groups. 31
- Completed Parent Coaching: 12 Direct DCFS Coaching. 9
- Of 247 finished or in groups currently 180 Direct DCFS (with continuing) 92
Recently, BSFF has expanded our work with Birth Parents to begin serving Foster Parents, and this work is showing strong results in supporting Foster Parents to succeed in improving their care of foster children, but also in qualifying for their re-certification.
We are also launching our first Best Start All About YOUth Programs in our new Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) Community-based Child Abuse Prevention (CBCAP) grant July/Oct. 2024-Sept 2025.
Finally, we will be working with Northwestern University in 2025 to prepare a new evaluation research initiative! We will look forward to learning from and collaborating with ICDP colleagues internationally!
II. PARTNER Grants
New and important grants received in the last 3-4 months:
- DCFS Community-based CAP (CBCAP): 1 July 2024-30 Sept 2025. This is a unique Prevention Project funded from final COVID monies, with an important emphasis on serving community-based families – parents and youth, who may be struggling but are not yet DCFS-involved. The goal is provide parenting supports early, so these caregivers can succeed in strengthening their parenting so their children are never involved in the Child Welfare System. We will serve a majority of universal population parents with this special grant.
- Dunham Foundation. This is a first-time initiative by the Foundation to support D131 School District. We were invited in to the project late and the District is piloting our afterschool Youth Leadership Project.
III. The LCFS BSFF OFFICE will be moved in December 2024 to a larger space that we believe will serve as a model “Best Start Family Center” for LCFS! More on this in our next report!