Texas

Thriving Families Safer Children Texas seeks to capitalize on statewide and community-level partnerships and systems building efforts to strengthen work to promote healthy families and communities.

The newly established Family Support Services division within the Texas Health and Human Services agency leads the effort. Formerly located within Texas’ child welfare agency, the division is positioned to continue its partnership with child welfare leaders while forming new alignments with child and family serving programs under the health and human services umbrella that support early childhood intervention, family health, behavioral health, services for military families, and other programs.

The following activities demonstrate our historical and ongoing commitment to advance cross agency and cross system partnerships and to create and strengthen community-level coalition and systems building work:

• Providing resources and tools to communities to assess local needs related to maltreatment risk, identify existing prevention coalitions, and to support strategies to shift service delivery toward prevention and family well-being.
• Establishing a state level Parent Advisory Council to provide leadership and guidance for Family Support Services programs and activities. The group is made up of parents formerly serving as parent leaders for Family Support Services grantees. In its formative first years the council has developed a parent leadership toolkit and lived experience compensation guide.
• Collaboration with other Texas state agencies with early childhood programs to create a one-stop website for parents and caregivers of young children with resources and program information. The inter-agency group also secured a Preschool Development Grant including an allocation of funding to Family Support Services to advance early childhood systems building and family engagement work.
• Proving ongoing training opportunities to Family Support Services grantees and the broader prevention and family support community. Trainings include a learning series that extends from our annual Partners In Prevention conference to continue to build on popular topics. The series is also a vehicle for collaborative work such as our ongoing interagency partnership with father-serving programs to provide a fatherhood webinar series.