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Society for Research in Child Development Patrice L. Engle Dissertation Grant for Global Early Child Development The Patrice L. Engle Dissertation Grant provides support for students interested in a career in global early child development who are from or doing research in low- or middle-income countries. The Grant includes US $5,000 to support dissertation research and a 2-year student membership to SRCD. Applicant Eligibility and Responsibility 1. Dissertation research in global early child development with a one-year Grant for $5,000. The developmental focus of the research should include children, prenatal to 6 years of age living in low- or middle- income countries, as defined by the World Bank.  Potential topics could include (but not limited to): The effectiveness of different models of parenting support on early child development. Examination of how child care programs promote child development and family involvement. The effectiveness of 2-generation programs that provide maternal and child support. Innovative strategies to integrate programs that promote early child development with health or nutritional services for young children. Innovative strategies to integrate child development interventions with social protection services or programs to promote maternal mental health or education. Innovative strategies to involve fathers and other extended family members in early child development programs. Development of measurement strategies, indicators, and assessment tools for children and family interactions that can be implemented with reliability in low resource settings. Strategies for effective scale-up of demonstration programs.

The purpose of this FOA would be to establish, by awarding one cooperative agreement, a National Child Welfare Workforce Institute (NCWWI) to advance federal priorities to improve safety, permanency, and well-being by building the capacity of child welfare professionals and improving the organizations that recruit, train, supervise, manage, and retain them. The Workforce Institute will play a national leadership role in the field of child welfare in the following broad areas: (1)Demonstrating how university partnerships support workforce development; (2) Implementing organizational interventions to improve workforce recruitment and retention; (3) Providing leadership training across the child welfare career spectrum; (4) Developing cross system approaches to improve worker and child outcomes; and (5) Building evidence of best practices in workforce development. A broad range of activities will be undertaken by the Workforce Institute to promote effective child welfare practice, enhance agency efforts to create supportive work environments, and improve worker recruitment and retention outcomes by: Implementing an innovative, comprehensive and integrated organizational, educational, and professional development approach to effective child welfare workforce development building on the last two iterations of NCWWI work; Implementing effective workforce organizational interventions that result in improved agency climate, worker preparation, recruitment, and retention outcomes for agencies; such as reduction in emotional stress and worker burnout, increased length of stay for workers, changes in worker attitude and satisfaction, increased recruitment, etc.; Demonstrating expertise in collecting and disseminating information about effective and promising workforce practices in innovative ways;

This targeted 5-year cooperative agreement is to be awarded to create a national center of excellence to develop, implement and evaluate curriculum in child welfare agency settings that will: Support the child welfare workforce to better understand social and emotional needs of children and families involved in the child welfare system. Support the child welfare workforce to better screen and assess for social and emotional needs of children and families. Support the child welfare workforce to understand the effective interventions and active ingredients of those interventions and how to ensure children and families receive those interventions. Increase exposure to active ingredients and Evidence Based Practices for agency staff through enhanced curriculum and practicums. Provide professional development opportunities for agency staff by developing, delivering, and evaluating course offerings, continuing education, and certificate programs aimed at addressing the shortage of child welfare practitioners prepared to deliver evidence based child and family treatment. Provide curriculum aimed at assisting case managers to make excellent decisions about how to refer and evaluate the effectiveness of the services provided to the children and families in their care. Develop decision making tools for agency leadership that might assist them in assessing their current mental health service array. These tools would provide direction about the cost and effectiveness of the mental health services in their current service array, assist the administrator in evaluating if the current mental health services are achieving intended outcomes, and provide guidance on best practice in implementing evidence based treatment services.

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) plans to solicit applications for Child Care Policy Research Partnership grants. These four-year cooperative agreements will be conducted through partnerships between CCDF Lead Agencies in states, territories, or tribes and researchers from institutions of higher education, research organizations, and other eligible organizations. Applications are invited from CCDF Lead Agencies, institutions of higher education, research organizations, and other organizations with proven expertise conducting policy research. The work supported by this grant program should be collaborative from start to finish. Specifically, the CCDF Lead Agency and their research partners need to work together throughout all phases of the project. Child Care Policy Research Partnership grantees will be expected to pursue research questions of national and state relevance. Therefore, grantees are encouraged to include other local and state child care stakeholders. These projects are intended to add to our knowledge about the efficacy of child care subsidy policies and quality improvement initiatives that support employment and self-sufficiency outcomes for parents, increase low-income families' access to high quality child care programs, and promote positive learning and school readiness outcomes for children. Examples of priority questions include, but are not limited to: effects of policy changes since the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Act of 2014, supports for family child care providers, consumer education, licensing and monitoring, and efforts to build the supply of high-quality care. Funding is subject to availability of funds and the best interests of the federal government.

The purpose of this funding opportunity announcement is to establish by cooperative agreement a National Center for Community-Based Child Abuse Prevention (Center). The project will have a 60-month project period with five 12-month budget periods. The Center will be the primary provider of training and technical assistance to build the capacity of Community-Based Child Abuse Prevention (CBCAP) State Lead Agencies (SLAs), and their partners, to implement successful strategies that strengthen families and prevents child maltreatment. The key focus of the Center will be to enhance the ability of SLAs to effectively implement the requirements of the program and support evidence-informed and evidence-based child maltreatment prevention programs and activities. The Center will facilitate lead agency efforts in the planning and development of a network of interdisciplinary community-based programs and activities designed to strengthen and support families to prevent child abuse and neglect. The Center will also promote stronger linkages between the CBCAP SLA and the child welfare, as well as other child and family systems.

The Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB), U.S. Department of Labor announces the availability of approximately $1.5 million total costs for one or more cooperative agreements to fund a project to integrate the issues of child labor alleviation and acceptable conditions of work into women's economic empowerment initiatives. The project intends to support service providers and policy makers when working with women entrepreneurs to ensure women-led enterprises can improve livelihoods responsibly without resorting to child labor or harmful labor practices. The project's outcomes include: Outcome 1: Increased understanding of child labor and acceptable conditions of work in the context of women's economic empowerment initiatives. Outcome 2: Increased availability of tools to integrate child labor awareness and acceptable conditions of work into women's economic empowerment initiatives. Outcome 3: Demonstrated effectiveness of tools in mitigating child labor and unacceptable conditions of work in women's economic empowerment initiatives. Outcome 4: Increased awareness and adoption of tools to integrate child labor awareness and acceptable conditions of work into women's economic empowerment initiatives by a broad range of stakeholders.The duration of the project will be a maximum of 4 years (48 months) from the effective date of the award.

The Administration for Children and Families, Children’s Bureau announces the availability of one grant to: (1) implement a multi-system approach among public and private agencies integrating community and faith-based to promote effective partnerships; (2) develop or enhance a navigator program to meet caregivers own needs and the needs of the children they are raising; (3) utilize intensive family-finding activities, including search technology, effective family engagement, collaboration with child support, and other means to identify biological family members for the target population to create a greater volume of relationships and connectedness within their families and establish permanent family placements when appropriate; and (4) implement family group decision-making (FGDM) meetings for children in the child welfare system. The project funded under this announcement will be implemented through strong collaboration between the grantee and the public child welfare agency. The successful applicant will facilitate cross collaboration and data sharing among relevant agencies, including the courts, child welfare, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), aging and family caregiver support programs, child support, fatherhood programs, education, domestic violence, mental health and substance abuse in order to better identify, assess, and service kinship caregivers and at-risk families within the child welfare system.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) invites eligible entities to submit competitive grant applications for funding under the Refugee Family Child Care Microenterprise Development Project (RFCCMED). Through the RFCCMED program, ORR will provide funding for applicants which, through internal capacity and partnerships, will provide refugee participants with training and technical assistance in professional child care, microenterprise development, and financial literacy; assist refugee participants in navigating the child care licensing process; and provide direct financial assistance as needed to enable participants to prepare their homes for child care business operation. The three main objectives of RCCMED are to 1) help refugees to achieve economic self-sufficiency by establishing licensed FCC businesses; 2) help refugee families gain access to licensed FCC businesses which will meet the early care and developmental needs of refugee children; and 3) assist refugees in learning how to navigate mainstream child care services.

Thanks to the generous support of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago is pleased to offer the Doris Duke Fellowships for the Promotion of Child Well-Being. These fellowships are designed to identify and develop a new generation of leaders interested in and capable of creating practice and policy initiatives that will enhance child development and improve the nation's ability to prevent all forms of child maltreatment.

Thanks to the generous support of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago is pleased to offer the Doris Duke Fellowships for the Promotion of Child Well-Being. These fellowships are designed to identify and develop a new generation of leaders interested in and capable of creating practice and policy initiatives that will enhance child development and improve the nation's ability to prevent all forms of child maltreatment.

This program will fund project sites to develop a community-based, multidisciplinary, comprehensive approach to responding to youth with sexual behavior problems, their child victims, and their families as well as a training and technical assistance provider to support project sites in developing intervention models. The purpose of this program is to prevent sexual reoffending, promote healing, and provide services for victims and families. The program will focus on interfamilial and/or coresidential child victims and youth with problematic sexual behaviors. Examples of these types of sexual behaviors include, but are not limited to, sexual contact between children who do not know each other well (i.e., foster home or institutional setting); sexual contact between children of different ages, sizes, and developmental levels; aggressive or coerced sexual contact; sexual contact that causes harm to the child or others; and sexual contact that causes another child to be highly upset and/or fearful. Applicants should propose comprehensive, evidence-based intervention strategies for serving both the child victim(s) and the youth with sexual behavior problems and their parents/caregivers.

When children are placed in out-of-home care (also called foster care), it is important that child welfare agencies find safe, permanent homes for them as quickly as possible. In many circumstances, children can be reunited with their families, but in some cases, children find homes with relatives or adoptive families. Child and Family Services Reviews (CFSRs) have consistently found that many child welfare systems need to improve their adoption work, as evidenced by their difficulty in achieving substantial conformity on permanency outcomes. These shortcomings include failure to make concerted efforts towards timely permanency for adoption and preserving family connections; inadequate engagement of parents, children and youth in case planning; limited and ineffective service provision; insufficient frequency and duration of child visitations/parenting time; punitive uses of visitation/parenting time; delays in establishing the goal of adoption; a lack of meaningful concurrent planning; and lengthy appeal processes for contested termination of parental rights. These permanency outcomes relate to basic social work, legal, and judicial practices that impact adoption outcomes and also have effects on the safety and well-being of children in care. The purpose of this funding opportunity is to award up to five 5-year cooperative agreements for the development, implementation, and evaluation of strategies that focus on better adoption outcomes by improving basic social work, legal, and judicial practice in order to eliminate systemic barriers to: adoption; preventing entry into foster care; and other forms of permanency. Due to the intersection of permanency, safety, and well-being, an effective system reform effort focused on improving adoption outcomes by improving concurrent planning and reducing time to permanency will also require attention to safety and well-being outcomes.

The Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB), U.S. Department of Labor announces the availability of approximately $6,000,000 total costs for up to three cooperative agreements of up to $2,000,000 total costs each to fund technical assistance projects to improve the capacity of civil society to better understand and address child labor and/or forced labor abuses and promote acceptable conditions of work in a sector and/or supply chain. The project should achieve the following outcomes: (1) Improved capacity of civil society to identify and document accurate, independent, and objective information on the nature and scope of child labor and/or forced labor, and violations of acceptable conditions of work in a sector and/or supply chain; (2) Improved capacity of civil society to raise awareness for the protection of workers from child labor and/or forced labor abuses, and violations of acceptable conditions of work; and (3) Improved capacity of civil society to implement initiatives to address child labor and/or forced labor and violations of acceptable conditions of work, including facilitated access to grievance mechanisms and/or remedy for victims of labor exploitation. The duration of the project will be a maximum of 4 years (48 months) from the effective date of the award.

The Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB), U.S. Department of Labor announces the availability of approximately $4 million total costs for up to two cooperative agreements of up to $2 million total costs each to fund technical assistance project(s) in two different countries to improve implementation of social compliance systems that promote acceptable conditions of work and the elimination of child labor and forced labor in coffee supply chains. Each cooperative agreement will fund a project in one of the following countries in the Latin America/Caribbean region, where DOL's List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor (TVPRA List) documents child labor and/or forced labor concerns: Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, or Nicaragua. Project outcomes include: 1) Adoption of a robust and sustainable social compliance system by private sector stakeholders in coffee supply chains; 2) Strengthened capacity of private sector stakeholders to implement a robust and sustainable social compliance system in coffee supply chains; and 3) New social compliance tools on child labor, forced labor, and acceptable conditions of work piloted in the coffee supply chain. The duration of the project will be a maximum of 4 years (48 months) from the effective date of the award. Applicants may apply for one or two of the cooperative agreements listed above. No more than two applications per applicant will be accepted. If applying for two cooperative agreements, applicants should not combine countries in a single application, but must submit separate applications for each country. Each application should request no more than $2 million total costs in funding.

ACF is funding a cooperative agreement to sponsor the Child Development Research Fellowship that gives child development professionals from the academic research community the opportunity to experience policy research relevant to programs serving low income children and families. The goal of the fellowship program is to expose researchers to policy environments, particularly at the federal level, whereby they gain skills and expertise for policy-relevant research. The program is intended to stimulate the fellows' knowledge of child development research and evaluation, particularly regarding services for low income children and families, and to inform their process of developing long-term, policy-relevant research and evaluation agendas. The public will benefit from the increased availability of researchers highly skilled and experienced in policy- and program-relevant research and evaluation. Fellows will engage on a full-time basis for a period of one year (with a possible second or third year at the discretion of the grantee and depending on funding availability). Fellows will be exposed to the broader child development policy environment, particularly at the federal level, and to the policy research community through activities organized and conducted by the grantee. The cooperative agreement will require active partnership between the successful applicant and OPRE.

This announcement solicits applications for the National Maternal and Child Health Data Resource Center Cooperative Agreement Program. The purpose of the National Maternal and Child Health Data Resource Center (DRC) Cooperative Agreement Program is to support a diverse population of stakeholders in the valid and standardized use of national, state, and community level data as it relates to the health of women, children and families.  This cooperative agreement program will support the maintenance and expansion of a DRC that highlights, describes, and facilitates access to publicly available data with a focus on increasing access to and timely utilization of maternal and child health (MCH) data among state and local governments and non-governmental organizations, including HRSA grantees. 

The purpose of the FICDRP is to reduce fetal, infant, and child deaths by improving the quality of fatality reviews and providing evidence-based prevention strategies. Currently, there are approximately 1,350 Child Death Review (CDR) teams and 175 Fetal Infant Mortality Review (FIMR) programs in the United States. This cooperative agreement will provide two categories of funding to improve and strengthen state and local capacity of the FIMR programs and CDR teams to perform complete and accurate fetal, infant, and child death reviews.

Under the 2016 - 2020 Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS), USAID/Zimbabwe anticipates awarding a five-year $25 million cooperative agreement to provide technical assistance to the Ministry of Health and Child Care (MOHCC) at the national level and in Manicaland province. This award will be made through a full and open competition, under which any type of organization is eligible to apply. Building on the achievements of current USAID-supported activities, the purpose of the activity is improved maternal, youth, and child health and survival in beneficiary communities and populations. This activity will improve the health of women, youth, and children in Manicaland by strengthening maternal, newborn, child health and family planning (integrated MNCH-FP) service delivery throughout the continuum of care, i.e., from the home, to the community, to the primary care facility, and to the tertiary referral hospital. Continuum of care refers to a concept involving a system that guides and tracks patients over time through a comprehensive array of health services spanning all levels and intensity of care. Integrated MNCH-FP service delivery refers to combining together MNCH and FP health services in order to expand access to care, increase efficiencies, and improve health outcomes. The activity will also increase access to a broader range of family planning methods through outreach services at the national level.

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF), Office of Head Start (OHS) announces the availability of approximately $7,582,500 to be competitively awarded for the purpose of operating a National Center on Health, Behavioral Health, and Safety (NC HBHS). The NC HBHS will provide training and technical assistance (TTA) that reflects current evidence, is research-informed, and promotes best practices. The NC HBHS will strengthen professional development outcomes for staff and improve outcomes for children and families enrolled in Head Start and/or Early Head Start programs. The NC HBHS TTA efforts will lead to improved health, behavioral health, and safety of children and families. Because of the complex work the NC HBHS will conduct, the recipient will be expected to bring together knowledgeable subrecipients within the fields child nutrition and oral health; physical activity; health (including hearing and vision screening); behavioral health promotion and prevention, including the promotion of mental health, resilience and wellbeing; and the prevention of mental illness and substance use disorders; safety practices; child and adult trauma; child incidents and maltreatment; emergency preparedness, response and recovery; prenatal care; environmental health and safety; and staff wellness.

NIFA requests applications for the Army Family Advocacy Program: Research and Prevention (ARMY) for fiscal year (FY) 2016 to 1) determine the effectiveness for child and domestic/partner abuse case treatments for Army Medical Command and 2) develop evidence-based information for prevention of child abuse and domestic/partner abuse for Army Installation Management Command.

NIFA requests applications for the Army Family Advocacy Program: Research and Prevention (ARMY) for fiscal year (FY) 2016 to 1) determine the effectiveness for child and domestic/partner abuse case treatments for Army Medical Command and 2) develop evidence-based information for prevention of child abuse and domestic/partner abuse for Army Installation Management Command.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement/Division of Children's Services (ORR/DCS), within the Administration for Children and Families, provides temporary shelter care and other child welfare-related services to Unaccompanied Children (UC) in ORR custody. Residential care services begin once ORR accepts a UC for placement and ends when the minor is released from ORR custody, turns 18 years of age, or the minor’s immigration case results in a final disposition of removal from the United States. Residential care and other child welfare-related services are provided by State-licensed residential care programs in the least restrictive setting appropriate for the UC’s age and special needs. ORR is announcing this funding opportunity announcement (FOA) to seek shelter, to include group homes and transitional foster care, care providers. Residential care providers, operating a shelter facility, must be licensed by an appropriate State agency to provide residential, group, or foster care services for children.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement/Division of Children's Services (ORR/DCS), within the Administration for Children and Families, provides temporary shelter care and other child welfare-related services to Unaccompanied Children (UC) in ORR custody. Residential care services begin once ORR accepts a UC for placement and ends when the minor is released from ORR custody, turns 18 years of age, or the minor’s immigration case results in a final disposition of removal from the United States. Residential care and other child welfare-related services are provided by State-licensed residential care programs in the least restrictive setting appropriate for the UC’s age and special needs. ORR is announcing this funding opportunity announcement (FOA) to seek shelter, to include group homes and transitional foster care, care providers. Residential care providers, operating a shelter facility, must be licensed by an appropriate State agency to provide residential, group, or foster care services for children.