EBP Exchange - UMB School of Social Work

As mentioned in the previous post, an outcome of the recent Minnesota Evidence Based Practice in Child Welfare Invitational Forum is a special call for papers… See details about this call below.

Children and Youth Services Review invites papers for a special issue focusing on implementing evidence-based practice (EBP) in child welfare services in the context of cultural competency. The field has long been concerned about promoting evidence-based practice. At the same time, social workers and allied professionals have worked to ensure that practitioners and policies in child welfare recognize and are responsive to racial, ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity in the families served. Yet seldom do the two themes intersect. This issue will focus on bringing together these topics as one to illustrate an approach in which one goal is always discussed in the context of the other.

Articles should be double-spaced in 12 point font such as Times Roman with one inch margins. The title page should include (a) the article title; (b) the authors’ names and affiliations at the time the work was completed; (c) the corresponding author’s email address, telephone number, and mailing address; and (d) a concise running title. The author’s names should only appear on the title page to facilitate anonymous peer review. An abstract of no more than 200 words should be included with up to 10 key words that represent the major topics in the article. Please use the American Psychological Association manual of style. Except for address for submission, further authors’ instructions may be found at: http://www.childwelfare.com/kids/guide_for_authors.htm. For further information about this initiative in child welfare, you may also see: http://ssw.che.umn.edu/EBP-CulturalCompetence.html.

The University of Minnesota held an An Invitational Forum on June 11, 2007.  This forum was held to respond to the problem of increasing pressure to demonstrate positive outcomes in child welfare services coupled with rather sparse evidence on what works for the children and families most likely to be served by these agencies. In addition, while children of color are often disproportionately represented in foster care, there is little information about the actual effectiveness of culturally sensitive and culturally competent approaches to practice. The goal of the meeting was to produce a plan to address this problem nationally and to craft pragmatic strategies that could be immediately applied in practice and policy. 

To view the proceedings of the conference - you can go to: http://ssw.che.umn.edu/EBP-CulturalCompetence.html

It looks like all of the presentations have now been posted and the site hopes to soon have other resources/tool-kits for other organizations to have similar discussions at the local level.  

One outcome of the conference was to craft a call for papers on culturally competent evidence based practice with families and children - I will post information about this separately for those who may be interested.

I’m cutting and pasting a conference announcement HERE - even if you are not able to attend, we should keep our eyes out for the  Dispropportionate Minority Contact (DMC) Best Practice Database and a National DMC Databook that will be launched at this conference in October.   I’ve also attached the conference brochure as you will note that the conference hopes to bring together family court, juvenile justice, child welfare, substance abuse, mental health practitioners, etc. together to review these best practices.
Stay tuned  . . .

On October 25-27, 2007, in Denver, Colorado, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention will hold its annual DMC conference, Reducing Disproportionate Minority Contact in Juvenile Justice by Making the Right Connections.

The conference will feature workshops and panel presentations on best practices to reduce DMC at different juvenile justice contact points, development and use of risk assessment instruments, and cultural competency training. Two useful tools will be launched at the conference: a DMC Best Practice Database and a National DMC Databook.

The registration deadline is August 20, 2007.

Resources:

To access further information about the conference, including a registration form, visit http://ojjdp.ncjrs.gov/dmc/resources/2007DMCConference.pdf.

I thought that some of you would enjoy this information because it is the first I have seen from Prime Minister Brown’s new “Department of Children, Schools, and Families” which was very recently created to integrate the child welfare, juvenile justice, and education under one roof and secretary.  There was a bit of harrumpffing from those who lamented the loss of status of education, from its own department, but I think the idea is quite intriguing.

 Also, this piece shows the longstanding effort that they have made to find “statistical neighbor” communities in the UK.  This is more sophisticated than what we typically do in the US and the methods are worth a look. http://www.dfes.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/STA/t000712/index.shtml