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LCCWEAR Current Projects...More to come!
The LifeSkills Center for Child Welfare Education and Research is involved in several projects. Check out the ones below, with more to come. Also, make sure to follow us on social media @WKUChildWelfare!
Active Projects
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The LCCWEAR provides program support services for LifeSkills’ four-year grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration’s Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic (CCBHC) Planning, Development, and Implementation Grant.
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A robust and multifaceted partnership between LCCWEAR and Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health & Family Services, designed to provide ongoing analytical support, assessment and evaluation, and actively create translational deliverables to inform service delivery, policy development, and collective advocacy.
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This project explored how licensed Kentucky social workers understand and utilize the Kentucky Board of Social Work Code of Ethical Conduct and address ethical dilemmas in practice.
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An interdisciplinary and collaborative pilot study using biometric analytic technology and a custom designed mindfulness intervention to assist frontline child welfare professionals with stress management.
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To better serve the justice-involved population, LCCWEAR is conducting evaluations to gather participant feedback from one-day events that are aimed to provide training and facilitate meaningful discussions on how courts can uniquely identify and connect Kentucky’s citizens and families with behavioral health services, while also strengthening localized support networks.
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The Integrated Family Trauma Treatment Clinic is providing a cutting edge intergenerational intervention for families with trauma to mitigate the risk of recurrence of childhood trauma and prevent out of home placement. This is an exciting partnership between the Center and the Cabinet for Health and Family Services. We look forward to working with birth parents and children with potential for or current involvement with the child welfare system.
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A regional effort to support the training and implementation of evidence-based trauma treatment in the Barren River Area. The CRETT promotes best practices in child welfare by providing evidence-supported trauma-specific training, consultation, education, and support to clinicians focused on measurement-based care, managing secondary traumatic stress and moral injury, court involvement, and interdisciplinary service delivery.
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Child welfare culture is complex, dynamic, and multi-systemic. It is a densely populated organizational ecology that shifts and changes over time. This study seeks to determine the influence of organizational child welfare cultures on the direct services provided to vulnerable families and children needing localized support systems.
Previous Projects
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A collaboration with the Warren County Public Schools to create a systematic process for preventative mental health screening for their students and evaluate the efficacy of the services provided by their social work staff members.
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A statewide study designed to better understand how service providers in Kentucky's Child Advocacy Centers and Sexual Violence Resource Centers adapted their practices to COVID-19 related restrictions and how these changes affected both the providers and their clients.
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An interdisciplinary effort to provide evidence-based group therapy for female parents with their own significant trauma histories whose children have recently experienced abuse or maltreatment.
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The LCCWEAR conducted an evaluation of the LifeSkills Adult Crisis Stabilization Unit (ACSU) to collect timely feedback and inform efforts for strategic improvement.
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A statewide study designed to capture feedback from Kentucky’s foster parents and inform efforts for systematic improvement across both private and public agencies.
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A qualitative study examining the work-related stress, subsequent health outcomes, and coping behaviors in frontline child welfare workers and supervisors.
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Learn More The LCCWEAR provides program evaluation services for the Pennyroyal Center's two-year $4.8 million grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's Community Mental Health Centers Grant Program, designedto expand mental health services.
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The LCCWEAR conducted an evaluation of the Kentucky Judicial Commission on Mental Health’s 2023 Mental Health Summit to collect timely feedback and inform efforts for strategic improvement.
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A multidisciplinary study designed to utlize photographs and quotes to identify causes of professional burnout and coping resources while connecting students with community professionals.
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This innovative and interprofessional virtual reality platform can be used to train child welfare practitioners, using expertly developed scenarios to identify the implicit biases they may hold.It is a catalyst for making more objective and informed decisions, essential to the healthy future of families and children.
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A recovery-oriented partnership with LifeSkills to provide program support services in their efforts to promote the integration of physical and behavioral health services.
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The desire and actions of our partners to collaborate to build capacity to serve children and families of our diverse community is exciting. The hope is to strengthen our valuable workforce to support our immigrant and refugee families.
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A partnership with LYFT Learning, supporting the implementation, assessment, and evaluation of their Life Skills Reimagined curriculum.
Find us on Social Media | @WKUChildWelfare