This evaluation brief provides insights on the learning that occurred during the planning year of the Child Safety Forward initiative, a national initiative to reduce child abuse and neglect fatalities and injuries through a collaborative, community-based approach.
This brief identifies four commitments for the field that will assist in advancing a twenty-first-century child and family well-being system. One commitment is to use a public-health approach that relies on the ongoing assessment of need, rapid testing, and evaluation that facilitates the design and implementation of a strategy that creates a cross-sector effort that is responsive and adaptable to community priorities for families. A second commitment is to the development of capacities, policies, and practices that shift power dynamics between systems and families, address racism and disparate outcomes in child welfare, and engage dialogue among community leaders on improving support to families across service systems. A third commitment is to accelerate progress toward a system of multiple sources of data and information that indicate the status of child and family well-being. A fourth commitment is to design, experiment with, and participate in learning collaboratives that facilitate and sustain effective strategies for preventing and responding to child maltreatment.