The Child Welfare Advocacy Hub

The Child Welfare Advocacy Hub (The Hub) supports advocacy initiatives to improve outcomes for children, youth, and families involved in the child welfare system—and for families more broadly. The Hub brings together advocates, strategists, subject-matter experts, media professionals, researchers, and other partners to craft timely and effective advocacy strategies. This work includes shaping policy proposals, developing compelling messages, producing communications tools, analyzing data and research, and mobilizing influential messengers. The Hub regularly shares new resources tailored for advocacy and policy audiences.

The Hub supports both short- and long-term initiatives ranging from rapid response to multi-year issue campaigns aimed at:

  • Influencing federal policy changes

  • Taking state policies to scale, and 

  • Promoting quality implementation of existing policies.

Topics that the Hub is currently focused on include budget advocacy, education for children and youth in foster care, kinship care, prevention, Chafee reform, and more. Strategies vary and may include a focus on:  

  • Recommending improvements to federal or state policy; 

  • Influencing administrative policy at the state and federal levels;

  • Raising programmatic funding issues and enhancements;

  • Encouraging better judicial practices;

  • Achieving effective oversight, and more.

The Hub operates in close partnership with the SPARC advocacy network, and works to identify and support national policy reform and advocacy opportunities that bring state and national groups and issue experts together. 

Housed at the Partnership for America’s Children, the Hub is supported by philanthropy. You can learn more by emailing Hope Cooper or Todd Lloyd.

State and local advocates can play a critical role in national policymaking. In child welfare, there have been innovative and effective strategies—like extending foster care beyond age 18 and providing subsidized guardianship as a permanency option for kinship caregivers—that were developed and refined in states before being woven into federal policy and scaled nationally. States and communities are also essential partners in ensuring policies are implemented in ways that truly benefit children and families. SPARC is proud to partner with the Hub.