Social Welfare faculty member Bridget Freisthler has received a grant from the California Social Work Education Center (CalSWEC) to "support the formation of sustainable university/practice partnerships for the purpose of evaluating emerging practices or programs to inform the development of curriculum and training products for the Title IV-E stipend and child welfare training programs."

The grant is for Freisthler to collaborate with the Torrance Regional Office of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) to better utilize classroom experiences to enhance learning in field placement for CalSWEC students to work together and identify and pilot interventions that enhance the number of types of community support available for foster families.

The goal is to reduce the time it takes for these families to access mandated services and reduce the lengths of stay and increase the rates of reunification.

"This project affords us the ability to develop innovative technology-based service provision interventions," Freisthler said. "This also enhances our ability to provide training on research and intervention development and evaluation for our students who will be working for DCFS once they graduate. This is a unique opportunity to put into practice interventions we develop and evaluate in collaboration with our agency partners in order to have children reunified with their parents more quickly after abuse or neglect has occurred."

Freisthler will recieve the $250,000 grant over a three-and-a-half year period starting in January.

The specific aims of the partnerships include:

• Evaluate a technology-based intervention (“Needs Portal”) designed to reduce the time from service request to service initiation for clients.  Outcomes to be studied include length of stay in out-of-home placement and rates of reunification;
• Create, implement and evaluate a “Youth Needs Portal” that will assist youth aging out of the foster care system in obtaining services and creating supportive social networks of other youth who have transitioned from the foster care system to self-sufficiency;
• Use classroom teaching and field instruction to involve CalSWEC and other Public Child Welfare students in the evaluation of the Portals and to identify and analyze interesting research questions related to data collected from the portal; and
• Strengthen the UCLA/DCFS Torrance Regional Office partnership in order to allow for an easier exchange of evidence-based research to improve practice

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