Chapin Hall

Chapin Hall and Casey Family Programs co-hosted the 2025 Community Pathway Convening in Louisville, Kentucky, bringing together nearly 80 participants, including lived experts, state and Tribal child welfare leaders, and policy experts. The convening focused on sharing innovations and lessons learned from jurisdictions designing and implementing Family First community pathways. These pathways are defined as any avenue that families can use to access Title IV-E–funded prevention programs or services through Family First outside of the traditional child welfare service delivery & case management context.

The Convening included facilitated discussions and presentations on elevating lived expertise in program design and implementation, financing prevention services, protecting family privacy, and leveraging data to strengthen Family First implementation. The report captures insights from these sessions, including strategies to build ethical, effective, and sustainable prevention systems.

Identified innovations include:

• Investing in lived expertise strengthens program design, trust, and outcomes. States like Kentucky and Oregon demonstrated how compensating and integrating lived experts into decision making improves both practice and policy.
• The Community Café participatory research method can enhance continuous quality improvement by embedding family and community voice into data collection and analysis.
• Warmlines (noncrisis phone lines connecting families to voluntary supports) are an emerging model for expanding access to prevention services. New York City and Washington, DC showcased how these efforts can reduce barriers to seeking help.
• Protecting family privacy while meeting federal reporting requirements remains a top priority. States shared approaches to managing prevention data securely, including using bridge tables, firewalls, and clear family consent processes.
• Sustaining prevention through diverse funding streams, including Title IV-E, TANF, Medicaid, and philanthropic dollars, is essential to long-term success. States like Oregon are aligning funding and removing unnecessary barriers to federal claiming.

Across all discussions, participants underscored that sustained collaboration between state agencies, community organizations, and families is essential to building upstream prevention systems that keep children safe and families strong.

The Community Pathway Convening report documents these lessons and serves as a resource for jurisdictions nationwide seeking to strengthen their Family First implementation and advance systems that center family and community well-being.

Want to learn more about this work? Contact Samantha Steinmetz or Olivia Wilks.

Read the report
Read one-page summary