Children and Family Futures

🏥 Are You Familiar with NCSACW’s 5 Points of Family Intervention?

Improving outcomes for infants with prenatal substance exposure requires looking beyond the individual and addressing the family system in which they develop, grow, and thrive. By intervening at key stages, agencies can prevent exposure, support recovery, and ensure children remain in safe, stable environments.

The National Center on Substance Abuse and Child Welfare’s "Infants with Prenatal Substance Exposure and their Families: Five Points of Family Intervention" is a framework designed to help collaborative teams identify critical opportunities to support families from pre-pregnancy through adolescence.

🌟How does this resource help you improve programs and practices?
• Understand the "Five Points" framework and how each stage offers a unique window for intervention.
• Apply evidence-based policy and practice strategies
• Learn how to strengthen cross-system collaboration between child welfare, healthcare, and treatment providers to ensure a seamless continuum of care for the entire family.

🎯 The Goal: To learn more about how to ensure that families receive the right support at the right time, download https://ncsacw.acf.gov/files/five-points-family-intervention.pdf?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=practical-tools&utm_content=ncsacw-5pointsjun2026

Knowing families are reunifying and being able to show it are two different things.

A family treatment court program in the Atlantic Northeast provides services to families every week. The staff see positive outcomes: parents in recovery, children staying home, reunification happening. But when it's time to renew funding, these successes aren’t fully captured. The data exists, but it hasn’t been analyzed to clearly show impact. That's exactly what CFF's Research and Evaluation team did for this program, and what we can do for yours.

National Reunification Month puts reunification at the center. The CFF Research and Evaluation team closes the gap between evidence and impact, working alongside programs to turn existing data into funder-ready outcomes reporting, and the sustainability narrative programs need to secure continued investment.

Find out whether your program can demonstrate its reunification outcomes. Schedule a call with our team: https://airtable.com/appt7JA9HCGhKfjPw/pag7cXcGYbaEFMPQh/form?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=reunification-month-2026&utm_content=ftc-mythparentsonly

START isn’t a court program.
It isn’t treatment.
And it isn’t child welfare as usual.

START is a collaborative model that pairs a child welfare worker with a family mentor who brings lived experience with recovery and child welfare. Together, they support families affected by substance use early, before removal becomes the default response.

June is National Reunification Month. The best reunification story is the one that starts before a removal decision is ever made.

What does early intervention look like in your jurisdiction?

Children and Family Futures supports agencies and systems implementing the START model across the country. See how it works in practice: https://www.cffutures.org/start/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=reunification-month-2026&utm_content=start-mythbuster

Who is a Family Treatment Court (FTC) actually for?

Most people would say: parents with substance use issues. The more accurate answer is the whole family.

While parents are the primary participants, FTCs are designed with children's safety, stability, and well-being at the center. That means engaging child welfare, treatment providers, other family serving agencies, and often extended family or kinship caregivers to support recovery and reunification.

June is National Reunification Month, and FTCs are one of the clearest examples of what successful reunification support looks like in practice. Families served by FTCs are 170% more likely to reunify and 58% more likely to achieve permanency.

Children and Family Futures helps jurisdictions build and sustain this kind of coordinated family-centered practice through our FTC Training and Technical Assistance program.

What does whole-family coordination look like in your FTC or jurisdiction?

🧠 Feeling overwhelmed by information overload? If you are looking for ready-to-use resources you can immediately apply to your work without spending hours digging through data, this is for you.

Spend just 30 minutes exploring a highly practical resource designed to help systems work together more effectively for families: Lessons from the Regional Partnership Grants Program: What Works for Families.

🔄 The Challenge of Cross-System Collaboration
Families affected by substance use often have to navigate multiple systems simultaneously. Each system comes with its own priorities, timelines, and expectations—making effective collaboration incredibly challenging.

🛠️ What You’ll Learn
This session introduces a National Center on Substance Abuse and Child Welfare (NCSACW) brief that summarizes 20 years of Regional Partnership Grants (RPG) Program experience.

Instead of an intensive, theoretical training, this is a fast-paced, guided overview of a tool you can use and share with your colleagues immediately. Learn how to apply key strategies directly to your work, including:

🎯 Shared Goals: Aligning priorities across different agencies.
🤝 Formal Structures: Building reliable frameworks for partnership.
💼 Integrated Services: Streamlining support for families.
📊 Data-Informed Decision-Making: Using evidence to drive better outcomes.

📅 Join the Session
Don’t miss this opportunity to add a powerful, actionable resource to your toolkit and strengthen your cross-system collaboration. Register now at: https://cffutures-net.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_p6E_aMx-QWyIYt1ROPaJbQ?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=engagement&utm_content=ncsacw-rpgwebinar1

A parent in crisis. A child welfare worker. A family mentor who has been there herself. That's what makes recovery possible. That's what keeps families together.

This month Children and Family Futures is spotlighting the Sobriety Treatment and Recovery Teams (START) model — one of the ways we bring people together around families when parental substance use and child welfare intersect. Not referrals passed between agencies. A coordinated team built around one family at a time.

👉 See how START brings systems together for families: https://www.cffutures.org/start-landing/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=behind-the-scenes&utm_content=cff-startspotlightjun2026

What does sustained cross-system collaboration actually require, and what changes when communities build it?

Not a signed MOU. Not a joint training. Not a task force that meets quarterly and produces a report.

Real coordination between child welfare, SUD treatment, and the family courts means shared data, aligned goals, and people in each system with the authority and the relationships to act.

When that infrastructure exists, the outcomes shift. Families are more likely to stay together. Children are less likely to enter care. Families receive the services and supports they need.

That's what CFF's programs are designed to support. If your state or community is trying to build that coordination, reach out: https://airtable.com/appt7JA9HCGhKfjPw/pag7cXcGYbaEFMPQh/form?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=engagement&utm_content=cff-consultcta-may2026

The Family Treatment Courts that keep children safe while parents recover didn't get there by accident. They built something most systems haven't: coordination that holds even when it's hard.

National Treatment Court Month is almost over. But the work doesn’t end.

Building a collaborative court means child welfare and the court can't just coexist in the same case. They have to coordinate on goals, on timelines, on what happens when a parent misses a session or a caseworker misses a hearing.

CFF works with courts and child welfare agencies to build that coordination. Not a training and goodbye, but structured, ongoing support to make the model work the way it's supposed to.

If you're a court or agency figuring out how to build or strengthen that system, we'd like to talk: https://airtable.com/appt7JA9HCGhKfjPw/pag7cXcGYbaEFMPQh/form?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=treatment-month-2026&utm_content=ftc-operationalcta

Help us close the month. What does treatment court mean to you? Share in the comments.

Prevention Week is behind us. The reporting deadlines aren't.

If your program spent May talking about what collaboration could do, now is the time to show what it did do. Children and Family Futures Research and Evaluation works with child welfare, substance use treatment, and related programs to make that case. Our diagnostic tools are:
• Built from 20+ years working with child welfare and SUD programs across the country
• Tailored to your program's specific goals and gaps
• Designed to give you focused recommendations you can take directly to funders and leadership

Ready to see what that looks like for your program? Schedule a time with our Research and Evaluation team: https://airtable.com/appt7JA9HCGhKfjPw/pag7cXcGYbaEFMPQh/form?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=prevention-week-2026&utm_content=ret-operationalcta

Not ready to connect yet? Start here: https://www.cffutures.org/ret-landing/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=prevention-week-2026&utm_content=ret-landingoperational

National Prevention Week is complete. The question that matters now is operational: When a parent's substance use is the reason a child might be removed, what does your county have in place beyond a referral?

Most counties have a pathway to treatment. What they don't have is a shared structure between child welfare and treatment that functions before removal is on the table. That's the gap START closes.

A child welfare worker and a START family mentor working the same family, with joint case planning and real-time communication across systems — that's the model. CFF supports the implementation: the training, the fidelity monitoring, the cross-agency coordination work that's usually where these efforts break down.

If you're past awareness and trying to figure out what building this looks like in your county, that's the conversation we're set up to have. https://www.cffutures.org/start-contact-us/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=prevention-week-2026&utm_content=start-operationalcta