ABSTRACT
A great deal of national attention and fiscal incentives are being placed on establishing systems to gather child welfare data. The child welfare field has spent the last few years trying to understand and respond to changes that have occurred since the mid-1980s. Families for Kids (FFK) is a multiyear, grant-funded initiative to reduce the backlog of children in out-of-home care by reforming the foster care/adoption system in Washington state. The challenge for child welfare organizations is to gather data relevant to their goals, analyze and distill cogent facts, and relate those facts to practice. Unlike many data-based projects, FFK used data as a change agent, rather than solely as an evaluative tool or a mechanism for measurement. In the initial round of data publication, FFK released the first description of children who were legally free in Washington state. The data regarding infants entering out-of-home care and the commensurate strategies for change unfolded over a full year.
