Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence
Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence’s (KCSDV) Empowered Families Kansas Project consists of three components aimed at improving outcomes for children and youth exposed to domestic violence and their non-abusing parents or caregivers. Long-term project outcomes are: increase youth well-being and connectedness; improve service delivery for youth and their families; and increase children’s and youth’s safety and permanency. Evidence and trauma-informed resources, strategies, training, and technical assistance will be implemented across all project components.
The first project component will establish new, residential and outreach youth advocacy mentorship services within five community domestic violence crisis centers. This innovative service delivery model blends evidence-informed mentoring strategies into the advocacy setting. Project partners include:
The second project component will increase the capacity of all 25 Kansas community domestic violence crisis centers to provide advocacy services to children and youth exposed to domestic violence and their non-abusing parents.
The third project component will improve the response by child protective services and child welfare professionals to the needs of children and non-abusing parents when addressing the co-occurrence of domestic violence and child welfare-related issues.
KCSDV recognized early on that survivors’ decision making often centers around the needs of their children. For the last 15 years, KCSDV has focused projects on the needs of survivor-parents and their children. KCSDV conducted the first ever, state-level child protective services Safety and Accountability Audit in 2003. Findings from that audit were used to build and implement a robust child and youth project that focused both on developing parent-child advocacy services within community crisis centers and on improving child welfare responses to survivor parents. A child welfare Train-the-Trainer domestic violence curriculum was one of the many resources developed and implemented on the project.
For more information, contact Kathy Ray: kray@kcsdv.org