Culturally Responsive Family Support Services in Washington State
As in many states, Black and Native children in Washington are overrepresented in the child protective system. To reduce these disparities, the Government Performance Lab (GPL) is working with the Washington State Department of Children, Youth & Families (DCYF) to provide more culturally specific and responsive services for Black and Native families. With the GPL’s support, DCYF is developing and testing promising practices to procure culturally responsive programs and contract with providers serving local Black and Native communities. These new contracting practices have the potential to spread to other jurisdictions that are trying to reduce racial/ethnic disparities in their child welfare system through improved social service arrays. To date, DCYF has released a pilot solicitation for Federally Recognized Tribes, Recognized American Indian Organizations, and other Native Serving Organizations to provide family support services that incorporate the cultures of specific Tribal Nations.
Challenge
In 2017, Black children in Washington were 1.7 times more likely to enter foster care than white children – and American Indian / Alaska Native (AI/AN) children were more than twice as likely. These racial/ethnic disparities are representative of national trends. In 2019, Black and AI/AN children were overrepresented in the U.S. foster care system compared to the general child population by over 60% and 100%, respectively.
In 2021, the GPL began working with DCYF with the goal of keeping more Black and Native children with their families and out of the foster care system. Community feedback pointed to a potential contributing factor to these disparities: many internal and external stakeholders agreed that DCYF’s existing service array did not meet the needs of these populations. Additionally, the Washington Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that DCYF’s services to prevent the break-up of Native families must be culturally appropriate. With this information, the GPL focused its work with DCYF around better tailoring DCYF’s services to fit the needs of Black and Native families.
To support DCYF in developing a strategy toward this goal, the GPL ran a community engagement process, which included family support service providers, non-profit organizations serving Black and Native communities, philanthropies, Tribes, and parents who had been impacted by child protective services. This elevated two related insights: 1) providers in Washington were already offering culturally responsive service models, like Positive Indian Parenting, for both of these populations, but these were not included in DCYF’s service array, and 2) stakeholders stressed the importance of contracting with provider organizations embedded in Black and Native communities across the state in order to respond to communities’ unique needs.
“Some of our providers were struggling to engage BIPOC families to enroll and persist in services. Through our community engagement efforts, we heard the need for more providers with shared identities and experiences with BIPOC families. For example, we heard that some Tribal moms were not engaging in our existing programs because they felt uncomfortable disclosing their prenatal substance use to a non-Tribal woman.”
- Maria Zdzieblowski, Director of Service Continuum, DCYF
Innovation
Since 2020, the GPL has supported DCYF to identify and implement the following changes to its contracting processes:
-
Investing in providers’ organizational development: Like many other public agencies, DCYF’s standard funding structure pays contractors for services provided; it does not cover the upfront investments needed to develop and launch new programs and services. Organizations that want to offer new services must independently secure the capital to do so, which tends to be more challenging for small, low-wealth providers and those based in Black and Native communities. To test how the agency can support providers to develop programs and services, DCYF plans to supplement their standard payments with funds dedicated to building providers’ capacity to win and execute public contracts and to start up new services. For example, this funding could allow providers to purchase a data system so that they can comply with contract reporting requirements or to hire and train program staff to launch a new service.
-
Revamping payment structure for providers: DCYF typically sets up its contracts to pay providers based on the number of clients they serve, often on a month-to-month basis, a common practice among social services agencies. This approach can create financial uncertainty and stress for providers — especially smaller provider organizations – if program enrollment significantly varies month-to-month. DCYF is testing alternative payment structures designed to be more predictable and cover fixed operating costs to lessen financial barriers to contracting with the department.
-
Offering direct support to bidders: DCYF is working to provide resources and services to make bidding on a solicitation easier, like open office hours with potential bidders and templates for bidders to create their response. These resources can increase the capacity of providers – which is often strained – to develop high-quality bids.
-
Designing open-ended solicitations: Overly prescriptive solicitations can discourage service providers that are offering alternative, innovative, culturally specific models from bidding on and winning contracts. DCYF is testing issuing intentionally open-ended solicitations to allow providers to propose the services and program models that they believe best meet their clients’ needs.
“DCYF’s standard procurement process makes it difficult for small and BIPOC providers to participate. We’re working to change that to contract with more providers with close ties to the diverse communities we serve.”
- Tleena Ives, Director of the Office of Tribal Relations, DCYF
Progress
DCYF incorporated many of these contracting approaches into its procurement for a pilot program for culturally specific and responsive services delivered by Federally Recognized Tribes, Recognized American Indian Organizations, and other Native Serving Organizations. Through contracting for services that incorporate the cultures of specific Tribal Nations, the pilot aims to prevent the separation of Native children from their family. During this procurement process, DCYF also released a concept paper, which summarized the funding opportunity – six months before the solicitation opened. By giving service providers additional time to prepare for and provide feedback on the opportunity, the concept paper intended to increase the quality of both the solicitation and bids.
The GPL is also working with DCYF to identify opportunities to increase culturally responsive supports and services for Black families. In a significant step toward this goal, DCYF released a Request for Information (RFI) to gather public input on piloting these supports and services.
Throughout this engagement, the GPL plans to monitor whether the adjustments to DCYF’s contracting process result in new models and providers being integrated into its service array, and whether these changes translate into improved service delivery for the state’s Black and Native families.
“Services and supports intended to support families and prevent child removals are most successful when they reflect the communities they serve and are delivered by groups that share lived experiences with and live near the parents they support. DCYF knows this, and we’re working to transform our services system to be more equitable.”
- Vickie Ybarra, Director of the Office of Innovation, Alignment, and Accountability, DCYF
