Ohio Child Welfare Training
Program (OCWTP)
Administering Organization
The Ohio Child Welfare Training Program is a collaborative
partnership between:
Program Objectives and Unique Needs Addressed
Founded in 1986, the Ohio Child Welfare Training Program
is a comprehensive, competency-based in-service training system
for staff, managers, adoptive, and foster parents in Ohio’s
88 county Public Children Services Agencies. Designed as a
state/county, public/private collaboration, the OCWTP develops
and provides an array of trainings to promote mastery of the
complex knowledge and skills needed to assure protection and
permanence for Ohio’s children at risk for abuse and
neglect.
Over the past 20 years the OCWTP has been addressing the
need to consider cultural issues and to develop cultural competence
in child welfare practice. Since the program’s inception
in 1986, OCWTP core curriculum for caseworkers has addressed
cultural considerations in all stages of case planning and
integrated them throughout the modules. Over the course of
time, particularly in the last decade, the OCWTP has been
developing and offering training on a wide range of topics
specifically addressing issues of culture and diversity.
Program Description
Multiple Courses Offered
The OWCTP offers a number of courses that are relevant to
child welfare practitioners working with refugees and immigrants.
Such workshops include:
- Culture & Diversity: This is a foundational
course on key issues related to culture and diversity and
to developing cultural competency – including the
participants’ need to first understand and explore
themselves culturally, and then to be sensitive and responsive
to children and families from other cultures.
- Survival (Basic) Spanish: This workshop offers
basic language skills as a means by which caseworkers can
make that initial effort to reach out in a client’s
native language and thereby demonstrate an attitude of cultural
respect. As qualified trainers and additional resources
are identified, the OCWTP hopes to offer basic training
in other languages as well.
- The Color of Child Welfare: The OCWTP is developing
trainings to explore the reality of disproportionate representation
of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system and
the significant role cultural competence can play to help
reduce it.
- Working with Families who are Muslim: This is
one of many workshops that offer culturally-relevant information
and resources applicable to specific communities.
- Casework with the Immigrant and Refugee in Mind:
This is the newest course being created by the OCWTP, which
will first be offered in March 2008 and is further described
in the following paragraphs.
Casework with the Immigrant and Refugee in Mind
Before the Ohio Child Welfare Training Project became involved
in training case managers on working with immigrants and refugees,
the OCWTP was informed of child welfare workers’ needs
related to working with Muslim families. OCWTP began to think
through how to best train case managers to work with this
population and invited members of the Muslim community to
be involved. Since the OCWTP covers the entire state of Ohio,
its recruiters strategically engaged members of the Muslim
community in the areas of the state where trainings take place.
This strategy has allowed child welfare case managers to develop
relationships with Muslim community leaders at the local level,
which has resulted in institutionalized collaboration long
after the OCWTP trainers have left. Currently, the OCWTP is
in the process of recruiting qualified professionals, who
are Muslim themselves, as ongoing trainers.
Throughout this process, the OCWTP became interested in immigrant
and refugee issues, as many of Ohio’s Muslim residents
are foreign-born. In March 2007, at their annual celebratory
“Trainer Event”, the OCWTP offered an in-service
session on “Training with the Immigrant and Refugee
in Mind,” which covered access to services, language
and information gaps, cultural issues, and the migration experience.
The speakers included the Ohio
state refugee coordinator, the Executive Director of Community
Refugee and Immigrant Services (CRIS), and a representative
from Columbus’
Capacity Building Initiative. The training was met with
a strong response and the participants demanded additional
training opportunities on such topics.
The two-day workshop being developed called “Casework
with the Immigrant and Refugee in Mind,” will include
presentations by refugee resettlement case workers. It is
being designed so that there will be an exchange of information
between child welfare and refugee staff, similar to BRYCS’
Cross-Service
Training model. In addition, the OCWTP anticipates contracting
with immigrant and refugee trainers to lead such trainings
throughout the state.
As a competency-based training system, the OCWTP requires
that each workshop clearly identify/list those competencies
from the OCWTP’s universe
of competencies that will purposely be addressed and/or
explored during training as a basis for strengthening participants’
awareness, knowledge and/or skills. For the workshop soon
to be offered on “Casework with the Immigrant and Refugee
in Mind”, the following competencies are specific to
skill development in the area of cultural competency and are
listed in both the workshop description and workshop materials:
- Knows ways in which an ethnocentric perspective can interfere
with workers’/foster parents’ ability to serve
clients from different cultures
- Knows how to involve cultural consultants and key informants
from within the culture and local community to facilitate
communication and promote culturally relevant casework/foster
parenting services
- Understands the unique problems and issues faced by families
who have recently immigrated, including legal issues related
to immigration and naturalization
- Knows strategies for conducting culturally-competent
casework practice for a number of casework tasks
What’s more, the OCWTP helps support and strengthen
local level collaborations that are forming between child
welfare and refugee resettlement staff throughout Ohio. For
example, Community
Refugee and Immigration Services of Columbus received
a contract from Franklin County Children’s Services
to provide child welfare intervention services to immigrant
and refugee families in central Ohio. Training on various
child welfare topics, which are conducted by the OCWTP, are
being made available to case managers from the local contracted
agencies. In this way, CRIS' staff has received training from
the OCWTP.
Resource Materials Used in Program
Resources from “Working with Families who are Muslim”
Resources from “Casework with the Immigrant and
Refugee in Mind”
- Curriculum – If child welfare trainers from other
states are interested in reviewing a copy of this curriculum,
please use the contact information below.
- The entire BRYCS Web site and Clearinghouse is highlighted
throughout the training.
General Resources
Groups Served by Program
The OCWTP primarily serves public child welfare workers throughout
Ohio, who ultimately serve families of all backgrounds across
the state. Over the past 7 years (1999-2006), the three main
refugee populations in Ohio were from Somalia, former Yugoslavia,
and Russia. It should be noted that Columbus, Ohio now has
one of the largest population of Somalis in the U.S.
Program Funding
The OCWTP is funded by a combination of federal, state and
county dollars administered by the Ohio Department of Job
and Family Services, which includes some funding through Title
IV-E of the Social Security Act.
Program Staffing and Required Staff Training
The OCWTP utilizes the expertise and talents of approximately
300 qualified trainers. Each year, these trainers carry out
approximately 2,100 days of training for child welfare staff
throughout the state as well as 2,000 days of training for
both prospective and licensed foster caregivers. To ensure
that the curricula content is effectively and consistently
delivered, all approved OCWTP trainers are required to receive
standardized training themselves on evidence-based models
regarding presentation skills, curriculum development, transfer
of learning strategies, use of technology in the training
room (such as PowerPoint and the Classroom Performance System)
and – last but not least – effectively honoring
and addressing culture & diversity in the training room.
Program Evaluation
Workshop participants complete an OCWTP evaluation form following
every workshop. Regardless of workshop topic, evaluation forms
for staff include items with Likert scales (strongly agree/
agree/ neutral/ disagree/ strongly disagree) that invite trainees
to evaluate the extent to which cultural issues in child welfare
practice have been addressed during the training.
For every workshop whose topic is specific to cultural issues,
the OCWTP is creating an evaluation that will have the capability
to measure (1) a workshop’s ability to address those
cultural competencies that have been identified as learning
objectives for that particular workshop and (2) the extent
to which the trainer demonstrated cultural awareness and sensitivity
toward the training group.
Program Outcomes
According to the American Society for Training and Development
and the Learning Resources Network, while most organizations
(77%) measure the value of training using satisfaction surveys
at the end of workshops, very few organizations (36%) try
to measure the learning that occurs as a result of training,
and even fewer organizations (15%) attempt to measure if training
resulted in a change of behavior. While the OCWTP has collected
workshop satisfaction data since 1987, it is now one of the
few statewide child welfare training programs to field test
a process to measure the learning that occurs as a result
of attending OCWTP workshops and then assess the transfer
of learning from workshops to the agency workplace.
In 2006 OCWTP conducted pre- and post-testing in 23 Caseworker
and Supervisor/Manager Core workshops and field-tested a form
to collect demographic data to help analyze pre- and post-test
results with several hundred training participants. In addition,
feedback on OCWTP’s evaluation design was solicited
from over 150 county and state child welfare professionals,
Public Children Services Association of Ohio representatives,
and OCWTP staff. Working with university-based researchers,
child welfare professionals, and training experts, the OCWTP
continues to revise the evaluation methodology to ensure that
it strikes the right balance between what is required in field-based
evaluation research and what is feasible and practical in
a statewide training system that serves 88 county agencies.
Program Contact
Ohio Child Welfare Training Project
http://www.ocwtp.net
Leslie Ahmadi
lahmadi@ihs-trainet.com
614-251-6000 x 25
Program Dates
The Ohio Child Welfare Program was established in 1986; the
specific initiative to train child welfare workers on working
with immigrants and refugees began in 2007.
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