Texas Permanency Outcomes Project (TXPOP)

Texas Permanency Outcomes Project (TXPOP)

Project Overview

The Texas Permanency Outcomes Project (TXPOP) develops sustainable best practices utilized by child welfare agencies across Texas to connect children to their birth families, regardless of their permanency outcome. TXPOP is a project of the Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing and the Texas Center for Child and Family Studies, in collaboration with the federal Children’s Bureau, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, and the Children’s Commission.

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Our Vision

The Texas Permanency Outcomes Project is building shared power with children and families to reinvent foster care.

Our Mission

TXPOP is refocusing practice, strengthening the workforce, and transforming how systems treat families and children within foster care.

Our Three-Pronged Approach

The TXPOP Practice Model

TXPOP developed and is testing a practice model for public and private child welfare agencies in Texas to use to engage children and their families in achieving positive permanency outcomes. This model encourages professionals to approach their work and interactions with others from a nonjudgemental stance with a goal of sharing power with families.

 

Statewide Capacity Building

TXPOP provides trainings and support to professionals with certificates in child welfare and child protection services from the Steve Hicks School of Social Work. TXPOP also offers an online resource hub that provides child welfare workers with resources, tools, and materials on engaging birth families and ensuring the child’s voice is at the heart of the work.

TXPOP has developed a multimedia campaign for foster, adoptive and kinship caregivers called Compassionate Caregivers. This campaign provides resources and tools on how to engage with a child’s family in a meaningful way.

 

System Engagement

TXPOP engages the system on the statewide and local levels by asking key stakeholders to meaningfully contribute to the work. Members of these groups include DFPS, the courts, child care licensing, parents, foster parents, former foster youth, and CASA, among others. These stakeholder groups meet regularly to weigh in on important aspects of our work and to spread the word throughout their networks.

 

 


Our Glossary of Terms *

Practitioners: An all-inclusive term for child welfare and child protection professionals such as case managers in child placing agencies, Department of Family and Protective Services caseworkers, and Single Source Continuum Contractor caseworkers.

Caregivers: Anyone caring for the child while they are in foster care, such as foster parents and kinship caregivers.

Families: The people who have been raising the child prior to entering foster care such as parents, grandparents, extended relatives, or fictive kin.

Learn More About TXPOP

TXPOP is refocusing practice, strengthening the workforce, and transforming how systems treat families within foster care. Learn more about our 3-pronged approach:


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