Idaho Department of Health and Welfare receives $669K Child Abuse and Neglect Discretionary Activities grant from the Administration for Children and Families

Title IV-e prevention & community pathways initiative - the state of Idaho requests title IV-e prevention accelerator funding to strengthen its child welfare infrastructure and expand evidence-based services. A statewide needs assessment revealed 40 percent of families lack access to behavioral health, parenting, and stability services due to workforce shortages, training costs, and data system limits. To address this, Idaho will execute an eighteen-month plan to scale a community pathways model, delivering voluntary support before foster care involvement is needed. Idaho will use assessment centers as regional hubs, applying motivational interviewing (mi) for screenings and referrals from schools, healthcare providers, and community entities. The grant will expand parent-child interaction therapy (pcit) statewide with national expert support and broaden multisystemic therapy (mst) for older youth. Structured onboarding, readiness reviews, and coaching will ensure clinical partners maintain model fidelity. To sustain operations, Idaho will build a secure, title IV-e-compliant data system to manage eligibility, tracking, claiming, and confidentiality. An external evaluator will conduct independent fidelity monitoring and data analysis. By project end, Idaho will maintain statewide community pathways operations, expanded evidence-based service capacity, and a functional claiming system to stabilize families and safely reduce foster care entries under the family first prevention services act.