Emphasizing this goal means that all department staff—including nurses at state hospitals, business analysts for federal programs, and every role in between—are uniting to achieve the overarching goal of improving Idaho’s foster care system.
But the department can’t achieve this goal on its own. It will require the collective passion and commitment from Idaho’s elected leaders, businesses, and citizens to provide a home for every child in need.
Staff actions
Each team at DHW has developed tasks that are either increasing the number of foster families or decreasing the need of children and youth to be placed in the foster care system.
While some teams' work is directly related to child welfare, others had to think outside of the box to identify goals. For example, DHW's finance team is primarily focused on traditional accounting and financial reporting tasks, but its members decided to design a forecasting model to enhance the ability of the child welfare team to plan. The model is intended to highlight system errors and budget cliffs earlier, giving the child welfare team early warnings of issues in the financial system that might block or delay foster parent and child support payments. This streamlining could help retain existing foster parents by making sure they have the support they need.
Department actions
DHW is doing more than setting and pursuing internal goals to boost the rate of foster parents in Idaho. It’s working in the faith and business communities, too. A new regional director in north Idaho is implementing a program called Faith Families Idaho, which aims to improve child welfare by bringing together churches, people of faith, and community partners to support children in out-of-home care. The department is also reaching out to business partners in the private and government sectors to pursue innovative solutions. Partnerships so far have resulted in state park passports granting foster families free access to Idaho state parks, a fun-filled night at Boise State University where student-athletes hosted foster kids on the BLUE turf at Albertsons Stadium and a growing number of businesses offering paid time off for new foster parents. (See more below about this initiative.)
