Initiatives and Projects

These are some of the efforts we are engaged in currently to address
disproportionality in Polk County:

MYFI – Minority Youth and Families Initiative: Initiated by the Iowa State Legislature in FY2004 to conduct pilot projects in Des Moines and Sioux City. The purpose of the project is to address service delivery to African-American and Native-American families in the child welfare system. Polk County DHS has contracted with Visiting Nurse Services (VNS) to provide family team meeting facilitation to African American families involved in Child Protective cases.

 Under the MYFI contract, VNS will:

• Provide Family Team Meeting facilitation to African-American families involved in the child protective system.
• Help families address medical needs and locate informal supports to address the different cultural needs of African American families.
• Provide culturally responsive service delivery to help reduce length of stay in foster care, reduce removals that occur as a result of cultural or institutional bias, and minimize re-entry into the system for African-American and bi-racial children.

*Sioux City has the Native American component of the MYFI due to the high percentage of DHS-involved Indian families in their service area.

BSC – Breakthrough Series Collaborative on Reducing Disproportionality and Disparate Outcomes for Children of Color in the Child Welfare System: This was a collaborative pilot project in cooperation with Casey Family Programs. The local BSC team is a committee of Polk Co. administrators, supervisors, a juvenile court judge, front line social workers and a parent and youth representative.

• The BSC team developed a pre/post-removal conference (PRC) protocol that has become standard practice on all Polk County Cases. These PRC’s seek to identify a family support system to minimize the trauma that an out-of-home placement will have to a child.
• The BSC team developed a hair care kit and tip sheet to address hair and cosmetic needs of African-American children in care.
• Spearheaded development of Cultural Liaisons to assist in training foster parents on the needs of children of color in foster care.

Undoing Racism™/Community Organizing Workshop: This workshop is facilitated by The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. The workshop is designed to provide a common definition of racism, provide an analysis to understand structural and institutional racism, and offer solutions for how individuals, communities, and systems can effectively organize to address and ultimately undo it. Anticipated outcomes of the workshop are to:

• Develop a common definition of racism and an understanding of its different forms: individual, institutional, linguistic, and cultural;
• Develop a common language and analysis for examining racism in the United States;
• Understand one’s own connection to institutional racism and its impact on his/her work;
• Understand why people are poor and the role of institutions in exacerbating institutional racism, particularly for people and communities of color;
• Understand how all of us, including white people, are adversely impacted by racism every day, everywhere;
• Address surface assumptions about how your work is (or is not) affected by racism;
• Develop awareness and understanding about ways to begin Undoing Racism;
• Gain knowledge about how to be more effective in the work you do with your constituencies, your organizations, your communities, your families;
• Understand the role of community organizing and building effective multiracial coalitions as a means for Undoing Racism.

Study Circles: DHS has also hosted Study Circles for DHS employees to discuss both current events and practice issues related to disproportionality, disparate outcomes, and multicultural issues, as well as personal beliefs and opinions on the subject. The goal of the study circles are to promote understanding of cultural issues that could positively or adversely affect a family’s experience in the system.

CPPC – Community Partnership for Protecting Children: CPPC is an approach (not a project) that neighborhoods, towns, cities, and states can adopt to improve how children are protected from abuse and neglect.

CPPC aims to blend the work and expertise of families, professionals, and residents to increase supports for vulnerable children and families. It incorporates prevention strategies as well as addresses needs to identify abuse and neglect.

Through Polk County Decategorization, CPPC involves community agencies, partners, concerned citizens, and stakeholders to address issues of self-sufficiency and Disproportionate Minority Contact (DMC).

Parent Partner Program – Parent Partner’s is a mentoring program that seeks to provide better outcomes around re-abuse and reunification of children on our child welfare system.

The goal of the Parent Partner Program is to help birth parents become successful in completing their case plan goals. This is achieved by matching a Parent Partner with parents who are currently in the Department of Human Services (DHS) system and have a child removed from their care. Parent Partners are mentors who have had previous involvement with DHS, and have been successfully reunified with their child for at least a year.

Parent Partners are paid to work with DHS clients who need mentoring and support. Parent Partners work with community based organizations to provide resources for the parents they are mentoring.

Iowa is currently piloting the Parent Partner Program in four sites: Northwest Iowa/Lakes region, Cedar Rapids, and Des Moines.

Fatherhood Initiative – This initiative seeks to identify options and resources needed to support responsible fatherhood.

In February 2001, the Governor’s Task Force on Responsible Fatherhood was established through Executive Order 17. The Task Force was charged with raising the public’s awareness of the consequences of father absence, identifying barriers to father involvement, identifying best practices, and making policy and practice recommendations that encourage and support fathers to be involved in their children’s lives.

Elevate: A youth empowerment group where youth aging out of the foster care system have a vehicle to tell ‘their story’ and improve the condition of youth in care and their transition to adulthood.

Elevate youth are currently advocating for the passage of a Sibling Bill that would protect sibling relationships and visitation through removals, placement, and termination of parental rights.

Kinship Care Work Group: Statewide committee of DHS administrators, workers, supervisors, foster parents, and advocates working to expand the definition of kinship care in the Iowa Code, and look at ways of better supporting relative and kinship care placements to reduce placement of children in foster care.

Model Court: Through 23 demonstration court sites across the country, The National Council of Family and Juvenile Court Judges (NCFJCJ) through their Permanency Planning for Children Department has sought to develop a clear vision for juvenile and family court procedures in child neglect cases.

The Model Courts identify impediments to the timeliness of court events and delivery of services for families with children in care, and then design and implement court- and agency-based changes to address these barriers.

The goal is to improve how courts oversee and preside over juvenile and family court cases to better adhere to the guidelines of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1980 (ASFA). The Fifth Judicial District in Polk County has made it a Model Court goal to address the issue of minority overrepresentation and disparate outcomes.