Report says DCF needs to incorporate family input into policies

The Massachusetts Law Reform Institute released a report entitled Family Voices: Insights about prevention services from families and youth directly affected by the Massachusetts Child Welfare system, which examines the state’s child welfare system and provides recommendations for improving the system and services provided to families. The report was covered in a CommonWealth Magazine article as well as in a legislative briefing hosted by MLRI and State Representative Adrian Madaro on May 9.

The report looks at the state’s child welfare system through the eyes of the families caught up in it. The authors conducted in-depth interviews with 14 parents and youth and met three times with representatives of Family Matters First, a group of over 100 parents with Department of Children and Families (DCF) involvement. For families, DCF is known not as an agency that provides helpful resources but as one that takes children away.

“Families want service and help without DCF involvement,” said report author Susan Elsen, the child welfare advocate at MLRI.

Elsen said the gap between the mission of DCF – to keep children safely at home with their families whenever possible – and how it is perceived by the families it serves shows the need to bring families into the agency’s policy and planning efforts. “We hope to put the voices of people with lived experience out in the public arena with respect to planning services to keep children safely with their families, to really show how useful and profound their insights are into what’s going to make services effective for keeping children safely with their families,” Elsen said. 

Read more in CommonWealth Magazine. Download the full report here.