Ohio’s Safe Babies initiative aims to transform the experience of infants, toddlers, and their families who are at risk of involvement in the child welfare system, ensuring they can be safe, loved, and able to thrive. Safe Babies Ohio helps communities come together to better support families facing significant barriers to achieving a safe and nurturing home.
Safe Babies carries out this work through direct case management and service coordination with a small number of families involved in the child welfare system. However, the bulk of the initiative’s impact happens at the local systems level, bringing together community partners and stakeholders across a wide range of sectors to spark change across systems and communities. Many of the challenges that bring families to the attention of child welfare are systemic in nature. Families often need resources and support that are difficult to access, or are simply unavailable, in their communities. That’s where the Safe Babies Community Team in Cuyahoga County comes in.
Safe Babies Family Coordinator Maddy Moser shared, “Families often encounter barriers that the systems they are interacting with are not always aware of. Safe Babies wants to bring these barriers to light and support the greater community in problem-solving, so other families do not encounter the same challenges moving forward.”
At the heart of the Safe Babies approach is cross‑sector partnership, where community members come together to engage in collaborative, proactive teamwork. This teamwork shifts away from “business as usual” and toward community‑wide improvement, always keeping the urgent developmental needs of infants and toddlers at the center.
The stakeholders who gather to understand the systemic gaps that hinder support for young children and their families make up the Safe Babies Community Team. Better Health Partnership is an important stakeholder in this work, because the mission of BHP and Safe Babies are deeply aligned with a focus on cross‑sector collaboration to strengthen systems, improve social drivers of health, and ensure every family can thrive.
Recently, members of the Safe Babies Community Team came together to identify key systemic barriers that place adults and their babies on a trajectory toward poor outcomes. These include the shortage of safe and affordable housing, the unaffordability of childcare, social isolation, and the complexity and red tape involved in accessing available resources.
The next step is to strategize how to stay better connected to other community initiatives working to address these core issues. While a great deal of important work is happening, it often occurs in siloed or fragmented ways. The Safe Babies initiative, alongside Better Health Partnership, recognizes that we can move this work further and faster by bringing together agencies, disciplines, and lines of difference.
Safe Babies Initiative Contact:
Delaney L. Jones, MSSA, LSW
Community Coordinator, Safe Babies Program of Cuyahoga County
216-770-4487
delaney.jones@escneo.org