Child Welfare Analytics Collaborative

---

The Child Welfare Analytics Collaborative is an innovative partnership between Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services, their Division of Prevention and Community Wellbeing and Department for Community Based Services, and Western Kentucky University’s LifeSkills Center for Child Welfare Education and Research. 

For well over a decade, Kentucky has developed a formidable and university-based system for implementing a collaborative and robust Quality Improvement program to support their workforce and evaluate and monitor their provision of services to families and children.

The Child Welfare Analytics Collaborative builds upon this strong foundation, leveraging the active contribution of the state’s child and adult protection agency and Kentucky’s growing applied research center focused on child welfare at WKU. Specifically, this partnership is intentionally connecting research faculty and agency data personnel to collectively utilize agency data to create translational deliverables that will benefit staff and stakeholders based on agency needs and priorities (e.g., manuscripts, presentations, videos, trainings, testimonies, etc.).

The Child Welfare Analytics Collaborative is a multifaceted partnership designed to strategically benefit the community through the use of data science, while proactively seeking solutions to essential areas that impact the Commonwealth and its most vulnerable populations (e.g., adoption related services, out-of-home care related services, child protective services, transitional services, clinical services, quality assurance related services, prevention services, and adult protective services, etc.). 

For more information about the Child Welfare Analytics Collaborative, please contact Principal Investigator Dr. Austin Griffiths at Austin.Griffiths@wku.edu.