MORE ABOUT ADVOCACY...

 

Recognizing that child abuse and neglect is best addressed through prevention, Prevent Child Abuse America focuses on creating more supportive environments and communities for families.  To this end, Prevent Child Abuse America advocates and promotes policies, programs and systems that benefit children and families.

To strengthen our efforts, Prevent Child Abuse America works in partnership with the National Child Abuse Coalition, which is composed of nearly 40 national organizations, and our nationwide Chapter Network on the state and local levels.  Through technical assistance, support and guidance to the Chapter Network and Healthy Families America (HFA) sites, Prevent Child Abuse America's advocacy program has helped to build statewide coalitions, sustain funding streams, and encourage home visiting across the country.

Our Advocacy Program communicates with chapters and HFA sites about important national child welfare legislation and how they might impact local prevention efforts through action alerts, legislative updates and monthly bulletins.  Prevent Child Abuse America has been instrumental in helping to create and sustain state and federal funding to support children and  families. 

Most recently, we helped to ensure the reauthorization of the Family Preservation and Support Services Program, renamed the Safe and Stable Families Program, as part of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997.  The Safe and Stable Families Program is a major source of federal funding for community-based family support services such as home visiting, parent support groups, respite care, information and referral services, and early developmental screening of children.

Prevent Child Abuse America also helped to continue two grant programs under the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA):  the Discretionary Research and Demonstration Grants and the Community-Based Family Resource and Support Program.   These two grant programs make up the core of federal prevention funding for child abuse prevention and treatment.

The CAPTA Discretionary grants, earmarked at $14 million for FY99, embody the federal government's leadership role in funding innovative programs, research, training, technical assistance, and data collection to address national issues in child protection.  Continued funding of these efforts will further are ability to understand the consequences and causes of child maltreatment, to track the extent and nature of abuse and neglect, and to develop effective approaches treating the harm and preventing the occurence of abuse and neglect of children.

The CAPTA community-based grants represent a consolidation of prevention-focused categorical funding at approximately $33 million in FY99.  These grants help local child abuse prevention programs provide the following services to families:  outreach, home visiting, child care, respite care, parent education, parent-child activities, parent support groups, counseling, substance abuse treatment, GED classes, and job training, among other things.

As part of an initiative funded by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, we began working with our chapters on the state and local levels to increase support for more comprehensive, community systems of child protection.  This initiative focused on creating effective and informed citizen participation in community efforts to protect children from abuse.

With the help of this grant, Prevent Child Abuse America is able to offer technical assistance and support to states, through our state chapters, as they plan for the development of citizen review panels.  These panels will help to evaluate the effectiveness of Child Protective Services (CPS) systems by providing oversight and review of...

Our chapters are also developing public educational packets on CPS systems.  These packets are intended to educate the public about their CPS system and to initiate positive and constructive reform of this system.

In addition, we have been working on securing long-term funding to make home visiting services available to all parents of newborns.  Stable funding is vital to guarantee the future success of the HFA initiative.  Over the past year, Prevent Child Abuse America has been dedicated to exploring funding through options such as block grants, Medicaid, and managed health care.  Many states were successful in gaining support through these means.  We will continue to explore other sources of funding as the emerge.