Purpose: Today, 1 in 5 children in the U.S. is foreign-born or is the child of immigrants (Census, 2000). When these extraordinarily diverse families come to the attention of the public child welfare system, direct service workers must untangle the numerous systemic factors that contribute to a child's risk and a family's capacity to protect and nurture. However, little knowledge and few child welfare resources exist that move beyond more traditional views of cultural competency to focus on immigration-related antecedents of current problems and the identification of immigrant-related individual and community strengths upon which to build. The aim of this action research project was to improve child welfare prevention and intervention services for immigrant communities through the development, implementation and evaluation of a strength-based assessment tool for working with families currently in the public child welfare system.

Method: Working jointly with a multi-service urban community-based agency, two University-based principal investigators collaborated with the agency's child welfare staff in the development of a strength-based assessment tool for use in preventive and interventive child welfare service delivery. The tool was then implemented by direct frontline workers for a period of 4 months. The process of the tool's development and implementation and the outcome of its use with families were evaluated using a mixed-method research design. Pre- and post-implementation measures of the relative value workers placed on, and their exploration of, immigration-related areas were solicited, as well as staff views about contributing and precipitating factors for clients' engagement in services.

Results: Self-report data documented a significant increase in the relative value workers placed on, and enhanced capacity of workers to explore and take into account immigration-related issues with child welfare clients and a demonstrated increase in the use of strength-based assessment and intervention techniques. Likewise, workers broadened their conceptualization of the contributing factors that brought clients to their agency and were more likely to focus on immigration-related themes and to utilize client strengths. The analysis revealed that while the implementation was more difficult than anticipated, workers found value in the tool's use, though considerable worker variability was confirmed.

Implications for Practice: As more immigrant families come to be served by the public child welfare system, workers' capacities to effectively assess and intervene with them must be expanded. At least two valuable implications for practice result from this action research project. First, the use of this strengths-based assessment tool helped to increase workers' capacities to serve their diverse families. Second, understanding how a novel interventive tool gets implemented in a community-based agency is critical as we seek to bring more empirically-based interventions to agency practice. The data collected in this project strongly suggests worker investment, achieved largely through their role as co-developers, implementers and evaluators, is essential to practice innovation.