Mission

The Hancock County Family and Children First Council, in partnership with families, will prioritize and evaluate services, and implement processes to address gaps and promote the strength of families.

Ohio Family and Children First: History

Created in 1992, codified by the Ohio General Assembly in 1993, and supported by Governor Bob Taft, the Ohio Family and Children First initiative is a partnership of government agencies and community organization committed to improving the well-being of children and families. This partnership is intended to draw people out of their day-to-day systems and align resources and activity around a shared vision for meeting commitments to children.

During the first years, Ohio Family and Children First (OFCF) focused on ensuring that all children enter school ready to learn. As the initiative developed, so did its goal. From 1991 – 2000, the cabinet council’s three goals were: prenatal/child health care, early learning, and family support. The council gauged progress toward the goal with measurable objectives, like child immunization rates, percentage of low-income pregnant women receiving early and continuous pre-natal care and the number of eligible children enrolled in Head Start and public preschools. In addition, the council tracked efforts to streamline state government and eliminate burdensome state rules.

Through strategic planning and regional focus group, OFCF endorsed six commitments to child well-being. These commitments, outlined below, will be used to develop policy, align program efforts and resources. Most importantly, the commitments will serve as a continual barometer of our progress in improving the lives of Ohio's children.

Ohio’s Commitments to Child Well-Being

The goal of OFCF is to enable every child to succeed. OFCF efforts are crystallized around six commitments to child well being:

• Expectant parents and newborns thrive
• Infants and toddlers thrive
• Children are ready for school
• Children and youth succeed in school
• Youth choose healthy behaviors
• Youth successfully transition into adulthood

The law establishing OFCF also provides for 88 local county councils. The membership of local Family and Children First (FCF) councils in all 88 counties membership mirrors the state cabinet council. In addition to the director of the county equivalent of the state agency, FCF county council rosters include family members who have received county agency services, Head Start grantees, non-profit providers, juvenile , county commissioners and other individuals interested in improving outcomes for children.

The responsibilities of local FCF councils include county-wide strategic planning, designing innovative approaches to meet identified needs, ensuring that the voice of the consumer is heard, and ensuring accountability for better results for children and their families. The local councils also have programmatic design and oversight responsibility for the Help Me Grow program and the Partnerships for Success initiative (currently in thirty-three counties).

Although implemented differently throughout the state and each county council, the clear intention of the local FCF council infrastructure is to coordinate services for children and families following an operating service coordination mechanism.  FCF councils serve all Ohio children and families. A primary focus, however, is services for at-risk children and families. FCF is not a program, but an initiative aimed at coordinating a variety of human services and educational programs throughout the state.

Key Initiatives of OFCF

Over the years, OFCF has focused on key initiatives identified by the governor and Cabinet Council to improve child’s well-being. The key initiatives for OFCF include:

• Access to Better Care – improving the coordination, availability and accessibility of behavioral health services (mental health, substance abuse) for children and youth. ABC is aimed at prevention, assessment/early intervention, and treatment services. ABC also focused on the importance for family involvement and advocacy in service planning and identification. ABC includes numerous projects such as Family and Systems Teams (FAST); Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders; School and Community Partnerships; Behavioral Health-Juvenile Justice projects; Early Childhood Mental Health Consultants and specific screening tools, including a focus on maternal depression.
• Help Me Grow - Help Me Grow promotes the well-being of young children through home-based specialized services and public awareness, with a special emphasis on early intervention and prevention. Along with parents' knowledge and their unqualified commitment to their babies, recent research about how fast babies' brains grow and develop highlights the importance of the first three years for getting babies off to a good start.
• Partnerships for Success –an initiative that helps county FCF councils mobilize around issues related to children and families; reduce duplication of effort between and among state and local agencies; make better decisions that lead to better investments of public dollars; evaluate the impact of these investments with an eye toward accountability; andprovide for long-term sustainability of effective programs and services.
• Children’s Trust Fund - The Ohio Children's Trust Fund (OCTF) was created by the Legislature in 1984 to maintain a focus on preventing child abuse/neglect, and to serve as a vehicle for distributing funding to support primary and secondary prevention programs throughout Ohio. Each local Family and Children First Council receives a grant from the CTF to focus activities related on preventing child abuse and neglect.
• Early Learning/School Readiness – The Early Learning Initiative (ELI) is a collaboration between ODE and ODJFS that is designed to provide children, often identified at-risk of school failure, with educational experiences that will help them enter kindergarten ready for success; and meet the child care needs of working families.
• Shared Prevention Framework – The Framework will serve as the foundation for prevention communication and collaboration across state agencies. The foundation provides a sustainable approach in maximizing the utilization of existing prevention resources and guiding agency budgets and investments. The Framework strategies focus on looking in and across state agencies to insure a prevention infrastructure that speaks with one voice through many voices to support the efficient and effective delivery of evidenced based prevention policies, practices, strategies and programs throughout Ohio.
• Increasing Accountability- Pending legislation, H.B. 289, will require OFCF and local FCFCs to do annual planning and reporting on increasing child well-being. In addition, state and local councils must collect data and measure progress toward meeting the commitments of child well-being. An independent advisory board will be established that will provide consultation to OFCF Cabinet Council regarding the Council’s activities and initiatives, evaluation existing efforts and help guide the directions of new efforts. In addition to H.B. 289, local FCFCs are being required to report outcomes met through the Access to Better Care Initiative and with the nonbehavioral health funds.
• Children’s Budget - Governor Taft asked state agencies to work together to provide a comprehensive picture of the state’s investments on children. The executive budget document included a companion document, the Ohio Children’s Budget that for the first time allowed taxpayers and policy makers to examine expenditures for children across agencies and programs instead of simply looking at individual line items in several child and family-serving agencies.