Supporting Families

Supporting Families provides an examination of a large scale, privately funded initiative designed to assist families before child protective services needed to involved. Whether one talks about the family support movement, the early childhood movement, or child abuse prevention, program planners struggle with defining their target populations and structuring their interventions. This volume documents the efforts of the William Penn Foundation and its Child Abuse Prevention Initiative. By chronicling the efforts of this unique initiative and its groundbreaking research, the authors provide many useful lessons for practitioners, funders, policymakers and researchers. These lessons are particularly useful as child abuse prevention efforts seek to move beyond isolated demonstration efforts and toward a universal system of support for all parents. Through the lessons learned from the successes and failures of the foundation, this book has many implications for prevention efforts underway across the country, and forms a reservoir of knowledge on how to assess child abuse prevention in urban communities.