A Better Way To Help Children and Families
The San Diego Community Response Guide is a practical tool designed to help San Diego County residents take ownership of supporting families.
Who Benefits from the Guide?
The Community Response Guide is a real-time resource that helps mandated reporters and community members make sound decisions and consider local options to help families receive the most appropriate support. The tool encourages the philosophy that even when a report is needed, families can also be supported by the community.
The guide delivers benefits at all levels.
- Mandated reporters gain clear guidance and practical tools to support confident, accurate decision making.
- Families get appropriate help for their needs, which in turn can help decrease rates of child maltreatment.
- Local service providers and community partners are recognized as primary preventive agents, helping families early and potentially reducing involvement in the child welfare system.
- Child protective services (CPS) agencies are better able to focus on legitimate safety concerns, not need-related cases that require community support rather than legal action.
- Communities have better resources to care for their members, strengthening local capacity.
By connecting you to local resources and helping you evaluate your concerns with confidence, the Community Response Guide supports appropriate use of CPS resources, supports family stability, and helps keep children safer.
An Innovative Pathway to Community Support
When a family has needs but the situation does not meet standards for a report to child protection, the Community Response Guide helps you easily connect a family with supportive services. The guide offers this support through the Family Connection Hub.
The Family Connection Hub is a collaborative effort led by SAY San Diego in partnership with 211 San Diego and the YMCA of San Diego County. The Hub provides compassionate, culturally responsive, and trauma-informed services to support San Diego families. Staff offer guidance, resources, prevention services, and a listening ear.
The Hub is designed to help keep children safely at home and support families across San Diego by:
- Creating a prevention-focused infrastructure with a wide array of services, including evidence-based practices.
- Removing barriers such as income criteria so more families can access prevention services.
- Investing in support services that reduce the need for children to enter or return to foster care or probation systems.
Guide Design and Development
The Community Response Guide was developed by Evident Change in partnership with the San Diego Child and Family Well-Being Department and Casey Family Programs, along with numerous San Diego–area community partners, advocates, and lived experience experts, as well as interdisciplinary experts on child abuse and neglect.
Activities supporting the guide’s design included creating a logic model, data collection and analysis, and Inter-Rater Reliability (IRR) testing. Data analysis involved mandated reporting statue, policy and practice review, community surveys, focus groups, listening sessions, and inventories of prevention services.
About Evident Change
Funding Acknowledgment
The Community Response Guide was funded in part by Casey Family Programs.