Regional Partnership Grant (RPG) Program

The Child and Family Services Improvement Act of 2006 reauthorized the Promoting Safe and Stable Families program designed to improve the lives of abused and neglected children and their families who are affected by methamphetamine and other substance use disorders. The legislation included a new competitive grant program and provided funding over a five-year period to implement regional partnerships for the purpose of improving outcomes for children and families. The legislation responds to parental substance abuse as a key factor underlying the abuse or neglect experienced by many children in the child welfare system. This effort represents the broadest Federal program ever launched to assist States, Tribes and communities across the nation to improve the well-being, permanency and safety outcomes of children who are in out-of-home placement as a result of a parent’s or caregiver’s methamphetamine or other substance abuse, or are at risk of such placement. In October, 2007, fifty three grants were awarded to applicants throughout the country.

The grants address a variety of common systemic and practice challenges that are barriers to optimal family outcomes. These challenges include recruitment, engagement, and retention of parents in substance abuse treatment; differences in professional perspectives and training; conflicting time frames across the systems to achieve outcomes; and chronic service shortages in both child welfare services and substance abuse treatment systems.

The RPG Program, administered by the Children’s Bureau, Administration for Children and Families, Department of Health and Human Services is supporting  support a host of activities and services to address these barriers, including the creation or expansion of family treatment drug courts, improvement of system-wide collaboration, expanded access to comprehensive family-centered treatment, use of evidence-based practice approaches such as motivational enhancement therapy, parent advocates, and recovery management approaches to drug treatment monitoring. The outcomes of the grants are being measured in a performance measurement system focused on documenting child safety, permanency, and well-being; systems improvement; and treatment-related outcomes such as timeliness of treatment access, length of stay in treatment, and parent’s recovery.

The reauthorization language also called for technical assistance to be provided to the grantees. The NCSACW provides programmatic technical assistance to the 53 sites awarded the multi-year grants.

View the list of grantees by state (PDF 67 KB). You may also view Abstracts by State (PDF 395 KB).

RPG Sites (53)

Array of Services (11) Child Focused (8) Drug Courts (10) System-Wide Collaboration (9) Treatment Focused (9) Tribal(6)

RPG TA Requests

If you are a RPG site interested in requesting TA from the NCSACW, please contact Larisa Owen toll free at 1 (866) 493-2758 or via email at rpg@cffutures.org.

Resources

Regional Partnership Grant Program Webinar Series Spring 2008