Current projects

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 Of the more than 680,000 children in foster care in the U.S., 31 percent are age 3 and younger. The Safe Babies Court Team™ (SBCT), created by ZERO TO THREE, is an approach that aims to reduce the time a child spends in foster care before reaching a permanent, safe home. The approach also aims to improve the long-term well-being of infants and families in the child welfare system. This approach connects babies and their families with support and services designed to promote healthy child development while working to ensure a safe and speedy exit from foster care. ZERO TO THREE provides support at the local level, such as training and ongoing technical assistance for each Safe Babies Court Team site. Local staff include the Safe Babies Court Team judge and community coordinator, plus two local teams referred to as the “family team” and the “stakeholder team.” 

Dr. Faria served as the Principal Investigator on a mixed-methods experimental evaluation of the Safe Babies Court Team in three locations: Little Rock, Arkansas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Des Moines, Iowa. This evaluation provides the first experimental evidence that the SBCT approach had a positive impact on maltreated infants and toddlers and their families.

• Cases assigned to judges trained in the SBCT approach exited foster care 4 months sooner than  cases assigned to the control condition, a difference that was statistically significant. 
• While not statistically significant, cases that received the full SBCT approach were 5 times less likely to experience a recurrence of abuse or neglect.      

The goal of SBCT is to achieve timely permanent and safe homes for maltreated infants and toddlers, and this experimental evaluation suggests that achieving both outcomes requires investment in the full SBCT approach.  

In 2020, the Michigan Department of Education’s (MDE’s) Office of Great Start was awarded a Preschool Development Birth Through Five (PDG B-5) renewal grant. One goal of the grant is to strengthen partnerships in Michigan’s birth-through-age-5 mixed delivery system. Across Michigan, a variety of agencies serve and support young children and their families, including MDE; the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS); the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA); the Department of Technology, Management and Budget (DTMB); and community-based partners. 

This brief examines how these agencies and community-based partners work together to achieve the goal of making Michigan the best state to raise a baby. Exploring the level of collaboration within the early childhood care and education (ECCE) mixed delivery system can inform efforts to strengthen partnerships among child- and family-serving agencies and thus promote more integrated service provision. 

While at AIR, Dr. Faria served as the Principal Investigator on a series of projects that examined how staff across government agencies in the early childhood mixed delivery system collaborated. We collected survey data from 2,528 agency staff and community partners. The survey documented attitudes and beliefs about collaboration and how people worked together. 

In the initial brief, Let’s Work Together: Documenting Collaboration in Michigan’s Early Childhood Mixed Delivery System, we used social network analysis to document and describe these relationships, with a particular focus on cross-agency collaboration. 

In the second brief, we reported on follow-up social network analyses to provide a deeper understanding of collaborations in the early childhood mixed delivery system, with a focus on the Great Start Collaboratives (GSCs) , early intervention including Michigan's Early On services, intermediate school districts (ISDs), and publicly funded preschool. These descriptive analyses can help explain why staff may be more or less likely to work closely with colleagues and guide how to support collaboration at the staff level. We conclude the brief by synthesizing findings across the follow-up analyses and providing recommendations for improving collaboration in the mixed delivery system.