Children and Family Futures – 2017
This brief presents lessons from the Prevention and Family Recovery (PFR) initiative that is designed to help build the capacity of family drug courts and their partners to provide a more comprehensive family-centered approach that strengthens the parent-child relationship to improve parent, child, and family well-being. Lessons are shared from four 3-year grantees and include: increased, renewed, and continued focus on cross-systems collaborative partnerships is needed to expand and sustain the FDC; the effectiveness of parenting and children’s services in integrally linked to timely, effective substance use disorder treatment; a formal governance structure is necessary to prioritized, oversee, and sustain the FDC work; FDC teams need to maintain a consistent strong focus on FDC participant recruitment, timely engagement, and retention; developing the “evidence-based practice capacity” of sites is a complex undertaking; FDC teams need to build bridges to connect families to services and service providers to each other; to integrate a truly family-centered FDC approach requires several paradigm shifts; sustained and consistent evaluation and performance monitoring provides a continuous feedback loop needed to drive ongoing program improvement and systems change; and to achieve larger systems change requires understanding and adapting to the changing contextual environment. 2 references.
