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What is LIFTS?
Louisiana Leading Innovations for Family Transformation and Safety - is a series of initiatives to strengthen families and to ensure children safe, permanent solutions. Louisiana LIFTS reflects OCS’ unyielding goal of reaching higher to ensure a family-focused and community-based system of care for Louisiana’s most vulnerable children. Too many of Louisiana’s children are still coming into foster care because their communities do not have the programs and services needed to achieve more permanent outcomes. We know children are best served in safe and secure families.
How does Louisiana LIFTS work?
With technical assistance from national partners, OCS has defined six key elements for implementation within 18 months to enhance outcomes for children and families:
- Improving Our Intake Decisions - The new OCS approach will utilize more uniform assessment and decision-making criteria to ensure more consistent response to the 25,000+ reports of child abuse/neglect which OCS receives each year
- Meeting Family Needs - With new, better and more uniform assessment and case planning tools, OCS is focusing on keeping families together in safe and secure environments. With family-centered evaluations, we will focus on the goal of keeping more households intact and fewer children in need of out-of-home care.
- Community-Based Services - To be more family-focused and community-based, services must exist in the children’s own communities. OCS is enhancing its commitment to working with prevention-oriented community partners to offer services to at-risk families. We will develop a comprehensive continuum of services of intensive home-based programs to build on the family’s strengths and needs.
- Foster/Adoptive Parenting - Recruitment and staff partnerships are being augmented to better support foster/adoptive families and to benefit children so that several placement options are provided within their communities. Some enhancements include standardized training and internal policy and procedures, more foster/adoptive parental involvement, and better, stronger links between foster parents and birth families.
- Residential Treatment - OCS is evaluating the current residential placement process and decision-making to ensure that these facilities are used as short-term intervention only for children whose emotional, physical or mental health needs cannot be met in a family setting.
- Transitioning Youth - Hundreds of Louisiana children "age out" of foster care each year. Better opportunities are needed for young adults to find permanent family connections and to take advantage of vocational, housing, and educational support to enable them to become successful adults. OCS is developing initiatives to ensure that all aging out youth have a smooth transition into the "real world."
Although we believe we are one of the best systems in the country -- with dedicated staff across the full continuum of care -- we know that Louisiana LIFTS can take our goals for children and families to even higher levels. |
