Session: From Referral to Resolution: Understanding Equity, Engagement, and Effectiveness In Voluntary Child Welfare Prevention Services (Society for Social Work and Research 31st Annual Conference)

Child maltreatment prevention remains one of the most pressing challenges facing child welfare systems across the United States. While voluntary community-based prevention programs hold significant promise for reducing Child Protective Services (CPS) involvement and supporting families upstream, critical questions remain about who accesses these services, who completes them, and what drives meaningful family engagement. This symposium presents four interrelated empirical studies to illuminate the systems, structures, and relational dynamics shaping voluntary prevention service uptake and engagement, with findings that carry direct relevance for jurisdictions nationwide.

The studies draw on data from the Prevention and Aftercare (P&A) program in Los Angeles County (the largest child welfare jurisdiction in the United States), which operates through 10 community-based collaborative networks. P&A provides voluntary supports to families at risk of maltreatment by addressing social determinants of health including economic instability, social isolation, and limited access to resources. Despite the program's reach, only a fraction of eligible families are referred to, engage with, and complete available services. Understanding why, and for whom, requires both rigorous quantitative analysis of administrative data and qualitative analysis of lived experience.

The first study examines equity in community-based service referrals by analyzing racial and ethnic disparities across risk categories in a linked administrative dataset of over 269,000 families. Findings reveal that racial disparities in referrals were most pronounced among low-risk families, underscoring the need for standardized, equity-informed referral protocols across risk levels. The second study models the full-service pathway, from outreach and initial contact through program completion, using a sequential analytic approach with a cohort of over 24,000 families. Results demonstrate that predictors of early-stage contact differ meaningfully from predictors of program completion, highlighting the importance of stage-specific strategies rather than treating engagement as a single outcome. The third study centers family perspectives on voluntary engagement through in-depth qualitative interviews. Five themes emerged, with relational connection to agency staff identified as the most consistent driver of sustained participation. Concrete supports, including housing assistance, food, and transportation, functioned both as practical resources and as early signals of worker trustworthiness and care. The fourth study offers the complementary perspective of frontline agency staff, who deliver services on the ground and navigate the complex intersection of family need, agency capacity, and system trust, providing critical insight into the organizational conditions that support or constrain effective practice.

Taken together, these studies reveal a coherent and actionable story: racial and structural inequities shape who gets referred and who engages; the service pathway from contact to completion is sequential and non-linear; and the quality of human connection between families and workers is the most powerful driver of sustained participation. By integrating quantitative and qualitative methods and centering both administrative and experiential data, this symposium offers a comprehensive, equity-informed examination of voluntary prevention with implications for program design, workforce development, and child welfare policy across the country.