Improving Child Welfare: Independent Living Project The Division of Safety and Permanence (DSP) continues to deliver updates on and improvements to child welfare practice through the Improving Child Welfare package. Improving Child Welfare is a collection of efforts aimed at better supporting families and the child welfare workforce by streamlining the work and centering family engagement. The Independent Living (IL) Project is one of four projects within the Improving Child Welfare package. The IL Project work has two primary focuses: Enhancing the existing Independent Living Transition to Discharge (ILTD) template Developing a youth portal to provide young people direct, controlled access to information about themselves in eWiSACWIS ILTD enhancements ILTD enhancements have been a long time coming, informed by child welfare professionals, Transition Resource Agency (TRA) staff, Department of Children and Families (DCF) staff and young adults’ recommendations and expertise. Most significantly, the enhancements are rooted in feedback DCF collected from county and tribal child welfare professionals, TRA partners, out-of-home care providers and youth during the IL Business Process Reengineering Project (BPR) in late 2023/early 2024. This combined input has been formative for the ILTD enhancements. The key objectives of the ILTD improvements are: To empower youth to lead their ILTD planning, emphasizing team support for them To allow for greater goal customization To encourage, enable and document the iterative nature of a youth’s transition planning Enhancements to further these ILTD goals and objectives go into effect as part of the February 2025 eWiSACWIS release. DCF is also using that opportunity to incorporate other IL updates that either emerged during the BPR or other input-gathering sessions or were part of logged incidents. Some of these additional IL updates include: Streamline how workforce accesses a youth’s IL page Add more structure to IL assessment/plan tab on IL page Adjust IL assessment/plan task reminder Create IL case note type Allow image uploads to IL notes Changes to the ILTD will also be reflected in updates to Form DCF-F-2549-E. Concurrent with these enhancements, DCF will release new ILTD resources and guidance documents to support the workforce’s familiarity with, understanding of and implementation of the ILTD changes. Youth portal Some of the IL enhancements included in the February 2025 eWiSACWIS release naturally relate to the forthcoming youth portal, projected to be complete in late 2025 or early 2026. The portal will be heavily informed by partners’ input during the BPR as well as additional input DCF staff collect in 2025. DCF’s primary goal for the youth portal is to provide young people direct, controlled access to information about themselves in eWiSACWIS.
