National Indian Child Welfare Association Conference: ICWA Compliance

I am near lovely San Diego in California, my home state, learning at the NICWA annual conference. If you know me, you know that I care deeply about child welfare issues, and especially that children stay connected to their families. The Indian Child Welfare Act is a federal law that requires child welfare systems to carry out special efforts to keep children connected to their families and tribes, and part of my work is about helping systems make improvements in this area.

At this conference we are sharing our work about ICWA compliance in North Dakota.  We've been working on assessing compliance for federal years now: first, in assessing what our courts are doing, and now focusing on interventions and intersystem collaboration to improve compliance.  This post is to share some resources that might help others think about how they assess their compliance.  Here are resources we are sharing or mentioning during our presentation (click on any link to download):

• PowerPoint Presentation
• Frey's Collaboration Scale
• ND Partnership Logic Model
• Year One of our grant timeline
• An article about Design Teams and how they work

If you have questions about any of our resources, please feel free to contact me: Melanie.Sage@und.edu or 701-777-1224.  Thanks!