Session: Challenging Inequities and Preventing Child Maltreatment through a Multifaceted, Multi-Level Community Intervention (Society for Social Work and Research 27th Annual Conference - Social Work Science and Complex Problems: Battling Inequities + Building Solutions)

Child maltreatment is a pervasive public health problem that disproportionally affects communities of color. Both the causes and consequences of maltreatment are complex, which no one service sector can address on their own. Therefore, multifaceted, cross-sector solutions that engage communities are needed in order to effectively address these inequities. This symposium focuses on a community-university partnership that centers community voice (particularly parents/caregivers with lived experience with child protective services) in the transformation of regional services across multiple sectors including public child welfare, health, public health, mental health and social services. The project, Parents and Children Together-St. Louis (PACT-STL), aims to prevent child maltreatment, reduce entry into the public child welfare system, and enhance the overall well-being of children and families in predominantly African American communities. PACT-STL uses multi-level participatory methods to: (1) leverage an existing child maltreatment prevention network to break down barriers to collaboration and reduce the siloed nature of services; 2) build system capacity to provide evidence-based interventions and (3) implement parent empowerment and family focused public health strategies. Parents are engaged in all aspects of the project, from representation on the collaborative network to selection of evidence-based interventions to providing consultation on data collection and interpretation of the evaluation findings. Furthermore, all aspects of implementation and evaluation of PACT-STL are guided by centering community voice and a race equity lens. Our definition of race equity comes from the Race Forward Institute and is “the process of eliminating racial disparities and improving outcomes for everyone. It is the intentional and continual practice of changing policies, practices, systems and structures by prioritizing measurable change in the lives of people of color.�

This symposium will present on four aspects of the project. First, we will set the stage by providing an overview of the project, the community-university partnership, and the conceptual model guiding the implementation and evaluation of PACT-STL. Second, we will present findings from one of the family focused strategies, Parent Cafés and discuss the ways in which this peer-to-peer learning program facilitated parents’ connection to other PACT-STL strategies. The third paper focuses on the Community Café model as a strategy to engage parents and providers in co-decision making. And finally, the fourth paper will report findings from our mixed methods, multi-level assessment of collaboration.