July 12, 2026

Family Finding in Child Welfare: How Kinship Placements Reduce Congregate Care Costs

Children often do best when they can stay connected to people they already know and trust: a grandmother, an uncle, a godparent, or another important adult in their lives.

But those connections don’t surface on their own. Family finding in child welfare is the practice that makes kinship placement happen by identifying and engaging relatives early [...]

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July 12, 2026

Building a Kin-First Culture: How Child Welfare Agencies Prioritize Family at Every Decision Point

Children do best when they can remain connected to family, and child welfare leaders and workers work every day to protect that connection under intense time constraints. The challenge is making sure daily practice, staffing, documentation, and supervision support that goal when decisions must be made quickly, so children can stay connected to the people [...]

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July 12, 2026

AI in Government Social Services: How Agencies Are Adopting It Responsibly

Drafting a single home study can take a caseworker two to three hours. In one Minnesota county, AI now produces a usable first draft in 30 minutes. Results like that are showing up across the country as agencies adopt AI: it gives caseworkers back the hours they lose to documentation. Before any procurement starts, though, [...]

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June 25, 2026

CCWIS vs. SACWIS: What Changed in Regulation, Funding, and Daily Operations

The federal government retired the Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System (SACWIS) in 2016 and replaced it with the Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System (CCWIS). The new framework changes how your agency can build its system, how the federal government shares the cost, and what your staff experiences on a day-to-day basis. The core shift [...]

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June 25, 2026

What Makes a Successful CCWIS Modernization Project

The agencies making real progress on the Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System (CCWIS) modernization have two practices in common:

They buy modular SaaS instead of locking into custom big-bang builds. They prepare their people for the new system before any technology goes live.

Skipping either is what turns a modernization effort into a multi-year stall, with budgets running [...]

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