The Journey to a Well-Being-Oriented System

Executive Summary

Across the country, many child welfare leaders are reimagining how to better support families before crises emerge and without the coercive child protection response that many families fear. These leaders – along with those from public health, early childhood, and other agencies – describe an intention to build an alternative system that redirects resources toward prevention investments and initiatives. Their vision for doing so, developed in close collaboration with community members and families, is to shrink or eliminate punitive government responses, like child protection investigations and removals; center racial equity and family voice to redesign oppressive and racially inequitable systems; and respond to the complex needs of whole families and multiple generations through more flexible, holistic, and integrated resources.

With over a decade of experience working directly with state and local agencies across the country, the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab (GPL) has identified eight areas of innovation necessary to create an alternative system centered on child well-being and prevention. Within each innovation area, the GPL has observed jurisdictions at five stages of maturity: baseline prerequisites, core building blocks, foundational innovations, transformative innovations, and the vision for the new system. Together, these eight areas of innovation, each with five stages of maturity, make up the GPL’s prevention maturity model. This model is informed by the GPL’s collaboration with child welfare and other child- and family-serving agencies across the country, including perspectives from direct service providers, families, frontline staff, agency leaders, and others, along with supplemental research.

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