February 2021 Newsletter
A Letter from Our Director

Welcome to the first CFRC newsletter of 2021. My most fervent wish is that this new year is filled with renewed hope and sense of purpose for all of us. In the spirit of emphasizing our new beginnings, this issue of the newsletter shares information about an exciting new project we are starting with the Illinois Children’s Healthcare Foundation that focuses on children’s mental health, an innovative data dashboard that we have developed for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, and a new collaborative partnership that we have launched with several prominent child welfare researchers in Illinois.

The past year has been a difficult one for all of us. As we move forward into 2021, I would like to share a few words from Amanda Gorman’s inspiring poem that she delivered during President Biden’s inauguration. Her words encapsulated the feeling of hope that I have right now, and I encourage you watch the video of her reciting the entire poem. For now, I leave you with a few lines from the poem “The Hill We Climb”:


We will rebuild, reconcile and recover.
And every known nook of our nation,
and every corner called our country,
our people diverse and beautiful, will emerge,
battered and beautiful.

When day comes we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid,
The new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we're brave enough to see it.
If only we're brave enough to be it.

Click here to see a video of Amanda Gorman reciting the entire poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz4YuEvJ3y4
Sincerely,




Tamara Fuller, Ph.D,
Director, Children and Family Research Center
Project Updates and News
CFRC Welcomes Cady Landa to the team!
Cady Landa comes to CFRC with a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a PhD in Social Policy from the Brandeis University Heller School of Social Policy and Management. Always focusing on social welfare, inclusion, and equity, her career has included public policy development and implementation, empirical research and analysis, community organizing, non-profit management, and public middle and high school teaching. In these endeavors, she has focused on several substantive areas, including immigrant integration; inclusive community-based services and supports for people with disabilities; special education; services to children, youth and families; the Medicaid, income maintenance and SNAP programs; and history and civics education.


She enjoys engaging with people in efforts to learn and take action to promote well-being and inclusion. She has always enjoyed being a mother to her now adult son, spending time with him and friends, meeting and talking with people, cooking, exploring new places, walking, and singing. She currently serves on the board of the City of Dayton’s Human Relations Council, where she participates with board and staff in efforts to address discrimination and include immigrants to the U.S. who have come to Dayton, Ohio.
CFRC Receives Additional Research Funding

Children and Family Research Center (CFRC) Director and School of Social Work Research Associate Professor, Tamara Fuller, was recently award a four-year grant from the Illinois Children’s Healthcare Foundation (ILCHF) in the amount of $562,964.00 to evaluate the implementation and impact of children’s mental health systems of care (SOC) in five communities within Illinois. This grant builds off a previous award of $1,147,532 from ILCHF to Dr. Fuller to conduct a 6.5-year evaluation of SOC in five other communities in Illinois.

The goals of the project, known as the Children’s Mental Health Initiative, are to improve community-based services for children with mental and behavioral health needs. These children and their families often need supports and services from many different child- and family-serving agencies, but in many communities, these services are provided in a fragmented fashion. By creating partnerships and integration among agencies and organizations, systems of care are able to coordinate services and supports to meet the needs of children and families, which is theorized to lead to improved outcomes.

The CFRC evaluation team, comprised of researchers Dr. Theodore Cross, Dr. Yu-Ling Chiu, Dr. Steve Tran, and Dr. Cady Landa, will work closely with mental health agency staff in the five grantee communities to implement a multi-method evaluation that includes qualitative interviews, focus groups, and surveys of parents and service providers, as well as longitudinal analyses of service provision, mental health costs, and child functioning. The five new grantees selected by ILCHF for this initiative include Bridgeway, Inc. (Knox, Warren & Henderson counties), Chestnut Health Systems, Inc. (St. Clair County), Methodist Medical Center of Illinois-UnityPoint Health (Peoria, Tazewell & Woodford counties), Rosecrance Inc. (Winnebago & Boone counties), and Rush University Medical Center (Chicago’s West Side). The project will run from January 1, 2021 to December 31, 2024.
CFRC Welcomes Faculty Affiliates

We are pleased to announce that three faculty affiliates have joined the CFRC!

Welcome to Dr. Hyunil Kim!
Dr. Hyunil Kim’s research is informed by his field experience as a child protective services (CPS) caseworker for in-home and foster care cases. His work focuses on developing the best possible evidence to help improve the safety and welfare of children and directly enhance our ability to address child abuse and neglect (CAN). For this, he has worked with a range of national and regional administrative/archival data to understand risk and protective factors of child maltreatment and CPS involvements.

Recently, Dr. Kim has received the Mentored Research Scientist Development Award. This grant is to support new investigators in conducting research related to preventing interpersonal violence impacting children and youth. His project investigates the relationships of community conditions and public policies with child abuse and neglect report rates using national and statewide data. https://socialwork.illinois.edu/directory/hyunil-kim/

Welcome to Dr. Will Schneider!
Dr. Will Schneider’s research examines the influence of macroeconomic factors, family complexity and fatherhood, and interventions in the promotion of child well-being and the prevention of child maltreatment. One of his studies examined the impact of subjective and objective measures of income inequality on parents’ attitudes about spanking and child obedience. The results show that perceptions of economic insecurity directly increased mothers’ risks of abusing their children—independent of these parents’ actual financial hardships or mental health conditions. https://socialwork.illinois.edu/directory/will-schneider/

Welcome back, Dr. Mark Testa!
Dr. Mark Testa is the Sandra Reeves Spears and John B. Turner Distinguished Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously he was a Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Director of the Children and Family Research Center from 2002-2009. Dr. Testa is well-known throughout the child welfare field as the architect of the Illinois Subsidized Guardianship Demonstration and a passionate champion of evidence-informed child welfare reform. Dr. Testa has received numerous awards for his scholarship and public engagement, including the UNC School of Social Work Excellence in Research Award, Angel in Adoption from the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Adoption 2002 Excellence Award for Applied Scholarship and Research on kinship care and permanence. We could not be more pleased to be working closely with him once again.
Spotlight on Practice
The Maltreatment in Care Dashboard
Children who are removed from the home and placed into substitute care should be safe from additional abuse or neglect. The CFRC examines the number of children who are living in substitute care that have indicated abuse or neglect each year, and those numbers are reported in the annual B.H. monitoring report. Unfortunately, the number has been increasing for several years, and the CFRC has been working with the Department to examine the factors that are related to a child experiencing additional maltreatment while in care. The Department has implemented procedural changes aimed at increasing the safety of children living in substitute care and wanted to develop a way to more closely monitor the number of children who are affected.

The CFRC data team has been working on simplifying the data into a format that is quick, concise and easy to understand—and developed a dashboard using the Metabase platform (metabase.com) that reports on the number of children in care who are abused or neglected. The dashboard shows the numbers on a quarterly basis and can filter them by the demographic characteristics, region, placement type at the time of the maltreatment report in addition to a number of other variables found to be related to the risk of experiencing maltreatment in care. You can combine more than one filter at the same time, and you can select more than one choice in each filter. Once you select the filters, it affects all the charts in the dashboard.

The maltreatment in care dashboard will be available to all DCFS staff on their intranet known as the D-net. Although it will not be available publicly, we wanted to show off this innovative new data tool in the video below. Please note that the figures in the video are for illustrative purposes only and are not based on live data. However, CFRC is exploring ways to use the skills learned in the process of developing the dashboard to add similar features to our Data Center in the future. So, stay tune for more to come!

Click here to see the Dashboard demonstration video.
2021 CQI Conference

The planning for the 2021 CQI Conference is well underway! The conference is
October 6 & 7, 2021 and will be held virtually. This year’s conference will focus on community engagement and equity and how CQI can make a positive impact in these areas. The Request for Proposals is now open! If you are interested in submitting a proposal we look forward to hearing from you.

Stayed tuned to the CQI Conference website for additional updates!
As a follow-up to our last newsletter...

We received a lot of interest on the Child Welfare Workforce Task Force. We are pleased to announce that the report has been posted to the CFRC site. Visit CFRC's News Release page to read more.
We want to hear from you! You can contact CFRC via email at cfrc@illinois.edu or via phone (217) 333-5837. Visit our website: http://cfrc.illinois.edu.

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