Current Grantees
Cohort 31
Family Service of Chester County
Evidence-based Program: The Exchange Club Family Center (ECFC)
Description: Low-income families voluntarily engage with this evidence-informed, long-term intervention program. ECFC is home-centered and personalized to each family, focusing on the creation of a safe, healthy household by addressing tangible, short term needs, such as food, clothing, and shelter. An integrative action plan is developed with long term family goals, including parenting skills. The CTF grant will focus services with the Hispanic community within Chester County.
County Served: Chester
Public Health Management Corporation
Evidence-based Program: Parent Child+
Description: The literacy-rich home visiting program is implemented with families with children less than 2 years old. Visits emphasize involving the caregiver and include providing curricular materials (high-quality books, educational toys, materials, guide sheets). Staff model pro-literacy behaviors for parents and pro-social behaviors for children. Visits are conducted in a culturally appropriate manner and with flexibility to accommodate families’ schedules and regular benchmarking of progress. The CTF funds will provide Parent Child+ services in north and west Philadelphia.
County Served: Philadelphia
Cohort 33
Bethany Christian Services of Central Pennsylvania
Description: Safe Families for Children™ (SFFC) is an evidence-based, nationally recognized program that surrounds families facing crisis with compassionate, caring community. It is an innovative and replicable approach to building a social safety network of community and volunteer support critical to the goals of child safety, family stabilization, and family preservation (foster care deflection).
Volunteer driven and professionally supported, SFFC recruits, vets, trains, and approves volunteers with specific roles, creating a Circle of Support that wraps around at-risk families.
CTF grant funds will be used to approve new volunteers, provide recertifications of established volunteers and serve families in York County.
SFFC is recognized as an evidence-based program on the Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse and California Evidence Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare.
County served: York
Bethany Christian Services of Greater Delaware Valley
Description: Safe Families for Children™ (SFFC) is an evidence-based, nationally recognized program that surrounds families facing crisis with compassionate, caring community. It is an innovative and replicable approach to building a social safety network of community and volunteer support critical to the goals of child safety, family stabilization, and family preservation (foster care deflection).
Volunteer driven and professionally supported, SFFC recruits, vets, trains, and approves volunteers with specific roles, creating a Circle of Support that wraps around at-risk families.
CTF grant funds will be used to approve new volunteers, provide recertifications of established volunteers and serve families in Bucks County.
SFFC is recognized as an evidence-based program on the Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse and California Evidence Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare.
County served: Bucks
Children’s Advocacy Center of Erie County
Description: This project will expand access to the ACT Raising Safe Kids Program, a promising evidence-based primary prevention model developed by the American Psychological Association. The project will focus on outreach efforts and training an additional facilitator to extend the reach of the ACT program into rural communities and municipalities of Erie County. To do this, Children’s Advocacy Center will provide incentive-based, structured, skill-building parent education for caregivers of children from birth to age 10, focusing on positive parenting, social-emotional development, and reducing early childhood exposure to violence. Through a series of facilitated group sessions, the program equips caregivers with practical strategies for nurturing safe, stable, and supportive home environments. Funding will support local program certification, outreach, marketing, advertising, and materials to increase participation among Erie County families to strengthen protective factors and reduce the risk of child maltreatment.
County Served: Erie
Children’s Crisis Treatment Center
Description: Children’s Crisis Treatment Center’s (CCTC) Parent/Caregiver Services are evidence-supported, trauma-informed parenting groups that aim to mitigate the impact of trauma, adversity, and chronic stress among vulnerable children and their families. CCTC offers several programs through Parent/Caregiver Services including the Filial Parent Program, focused on building family connections through play; the PriCARE program, focused on active skill-building to support children exposed to adverse experiences; Multiple Family Groups, which build core skills to enhance the caregiver-child relationship; and public psycho-education workshops to connect caregivers to resources.
County Served: Philadelphia
Columbia County Commissioners
Description: The Building Resilient Families program is a recovery-informed parenting education and peer support initiative designed to strengthen families and prevent child abuse and neglect. Delivered by the Columbia County Family Center in partnership with the Columbia-Montour Companions in Hope Drop-In Center, the program provides twice-monthly parenting education and peer support groups for parents and caregivers impacted by substance use disorder. Using evidence-based parenting curricula (Active Parenting 4th edition, Active Parenting for Teens, Crossroad of Coparenting, and Cooperative Coparenting through Separation or Divorce) and the Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors Framework, the program builds parental resilience, social connections, and parenting knowledge while reducing stress and isolation. Building Resilient Families offers an accessible, community-based approach that supports family stability, recovery, and child well-being. The program will also offer a full day of office hours to the program participants so individual support can be provided and the parent/caregiver can be connected to needed community resources.
County Served: Columbia
Community Youth and Women’s Alliance
Description: Community Youth and Women’s Alliance will use CTF funds to implement the Family Care & Connection Project that addresses the immediate concrete needs of families in crisis while helping them build stability and resilience through individualized case management, referrals, and parent workshops.
County Served: Chester
Connected Nest
Description: Connected Nest is a community-based nonprofit organization providing social and mental health centered support to parents and their children across the journey to, through, and beyond parenthood. Empowering Moms provides direct, evidence-informed services through mental health professions facilitating weekly peer support groups, online and mobile community platforms, and volunteer-led engagement opportunities. With CTF support, Connected Nest will expand Empowering Moms New Moms Groups into additional accessible community locations in Butler County (Butler City), Allegheny County in a range outside of the center of the city (Coraopolis, Monroeville, Dormont) and Beaver County using existing community partner relationships. Our Equipping Parents Program is a natural offshoot of the Empowering Moms program and will pilot expansion opportunities of Dad engagement as well as Single Mom support groups to strengthen family protective factors and reduce prevention gaps.
Counties Served: Allegheny, Butler, Beaver
Family Connection of Easton, Inc
Description: Family Connection of Easton proposes to deliver the ParentChild+ Home Program (PCHP), an evidence-based, internationally recognized early literacy, parenting, and school readiness program serving low-income families with children ages 16 months to 4 years. Through twice-weekly, relationship-based home visits over a two-year period, trained Early Learning Specialists work alongside parents to model developmentally appropriate reading, play, and conversation activities that strengthen early learning and family well-being.
County Served: Northampton
Family Service of Montgomery County
Description: Positive Parenting Program will utilize the Triple P curriculum to provide support to parents of children with disabilities throughout Montgomery County. Services will be offered in English and Spanish, in-office, community, virtual, or home setting to meet the needs of the family.
County served: Montgomery
Geisinger Clinic
Description: Child sexual abuse (CSA) affects over 30 percent of females and 10 percent of males and has immediate and long-term health consequences that can continue throughout the child’s lifetime. CSA is preventable. Specifically, creating safe communities, building relationships, and having societal policies in place have been found to be protective factors in preventing CSA. One way to increase those factors is to educate adults so they are more aware of CSA, know more about the facts and signs of CSA, and know how to react responsibly and to not only notice signs of CSA, but also to engage in behaviors that are child protective. Darkness to Light’s Stewards of Children® (SoC) is an adult-focused, evidence-informed educational program that may prevent CSA before it happens. The long-term goal is to create a community-based primary prevention program that successfully reduces CSA. The objective of this project is to examine the implementation and effectiveness of SoC at reducing CSA prevalence. This work will provide further information on approaching CSA prevention in communities and will rigorously evaluate one potential solution. The proposed project is important because it assesses a primary prevention intervention that could easily be sustained by communities and inform policies at the community and society level.
County served: Northumberland
Juniata County Children and Youth Services
Description: Juniata County Children and Youth Social Services Agency (JC CYS) will use CTF funds to support a comprehensive, collaborative project that will offer services that focus on the primary and secondary prevention of child abuse and neglect. This will be achieved through expanding the Functional Family Therapy (FFT) and Seeking Safety (SS) evidence-based programs currently offered through JC CYS. Enhancing existing intensive family therapy interventions will provide additional families with adolescents at risk of deeper system involvement with the structured, fidelity-driven model FFT. Enhancing funding available for SS will offer additional families a trauma-informed approach that addresses co-occurring substance use and trauma, which are prevalent among referred youth and families.
County Served: Juniata
Maternal and Child Health Consortium
Description: Maternal and Child Health Consortium will deliver primary and secondary child abuse and neglect prevention services through its Parents as Teachers (PAT), Family Center home visiting program in Chester County, with focused outreach in the West Chester, Phoenixville, and Pottstown areas. MCHC will provide voluntary relationship-based home visits from pregnancy through a child’s fifth birthday, using the evidence-based PAT curriculum with the four model components: personal visits, group connections, developmental and health-related screenings for children, depression assessments for parents, and a resource network with warm handoffs and follow-up. The program will be enhanced by offering Parents Cafes throughout the year.
County Served: Chester
Maternal and Family Health Services, Inc.
Description: The Maternal and Family Health Services (MFHS) Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) program will create an emergency fund to be used to support the immediate concrete needs of families in crisis. The proposed emergency fund fills a gap in an existing evidence-based program; the NFP program cannot have its desired impact on a family if that family’s basic and essential needs cannot be met during an emergency or crisis. The emergency assistance fund will directly support multiple protective factors associated with lower rates of maltreatment: parental resilience, concrete supports in times of need, and nurturing/ attachment. By ensuring families can meet their essential needs, the fund will enhance the conditions in which safe and healthy parenting can occur and avert child abuse and neglect due to situational stressors.
Counties Served: Lackawanna, Luzerne, Susquehanna, Wayne
Maternity Care Coalition
Description: Maternity Care Coalition (MCC) will provide parenting education groups to pregnant women and caregivers of children ages 0-5 who are incarcerated in county correctional facilities in Chester, Montgomery, Delaware and Bucks counties. MCC will expand our Building the Family (BTF) program in county correctional facilities. BTF groups are facilitated by MCC Parenting Education staff using the Growing Great Kids curriculum series, which provides strengths-based and solution-focused tenets for engaging caregivers, cultivating secure attachment, and strengthening family functioning.
Counties Served: Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery
Merakey Children’s Services
Description: Merakey will provide primary prevention services to families through parenting workshops. Two workshops will be offered. One will feature Collaborative Problem Solving, an evidence-based practice designed to reduce parent-child conflict and challenging behaviors by building skills. The other will feature Darkness to Light’s Stewards of Children, an evidence-informed practice designed to prevent child sexual abuse. The goal of these trainings is to better equip families to protect their children and build parenting skills. These programs will be focused on the North Philadelphia region. Merakey will hire a Wellness Coordinator to not only offer parenting workshops to families, but work to better engage the community and provide outreach to community organizations such as schools, faith-based groups, social service providers, etc.
County Served: Philadelphia
Mercer County NAACP Unit 2273
Description: CTF funds will be used to implement Safe Roots: a Digital-Age Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Initiative, a community-based prevention program designed to reduce the risk of child sexual abuse and neglect among children ages 6 – 12 and their caregivers prior to any involvement with child welfare systems.
County Served: Mercer
NOVA (Network of Victim Assistance)
Description: The Network of Victim Assistance (NOVA) of Bucks County will implement the Restoring Families Program (RFP), an evidence-based, caregiver-involved prevention program designed to reduce the risk of child abuse and neglect by addressing problematic sexual behaviors (PSB) in children ages 7-14 and strengthening family protective factors. RFP provides structured, skills-based group services for children and caregivers with the goal of promoting child safety, improving caregiver supervision and communication, and preventing escalation of behaviors that place children and families at risk of harm, family disruption, or child welfare involvement.
County Served: Bucks
SPCA of Luzerne County
Description: Purple Paws Cause is an evidence-informed pet protection and family safety program operated by the SPCA of Luzerne County that supports families fleeing domestic violence by removing a critical barrier to safety, the inability to protect a family pet. Informed by emerging national best practices such as the Purple Leash Project and developed in collaboration with the Luzerne County Domestic Violence Service Center, the program provides confidential emergency pet removal, temporary boarding, veterinary services, food, and essential supplies. By ensuring pets are safe, Purple Paws Cause enables caregivers, especially those with children, to access shelter and protective services sooner, reducing prolonged exposure to violence and supporting child abuse and neglect prevention.
County Served: Luzerne
The Foundation for Delaware County
Description: Family Village, a program of The Foundation for Delaware County (TFDC), aims to prevent child abuse and neglect among families in its evidence-based home visiting program, Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP), by enhancing NFP’s services through a medical-legal partnership (MLP) with Health, Education, and Legal Assistance Project: A Medical-Legal Partnership (HELP: MLP). NFP’s proven model is built on long-term, trusting relationships between specially trained nurses and first-time parents with low incomes. With support from CTF, Family Village will 1) expand screening for health-harming social and legal needs that contribute to the risk of child abuse and neglect among home visiting families, 2) resolve needs through direct legal support, and 3) increase the knowledge and advocacy capacity of nurse home visitors to prevent and mitigate risk factors.
County Served: Delaware
Third Street Alliance for Women and Children
Description: Third Street Alliance will deliver services and supports designed to educate parents, caregivers, provider staff, and the community about social and environmental risk factors with the potential to create situations that may lead to child abuse or neglect. Our strategy is to bring evidence-based practices to our program, through accepted curricula, and to provide parents and caregivers opportunities to engage with trainers and peers in safe spaces to explore risk factors and behaviors that have proven to result in healthy outcomes. We will offer a 14-week parent and caregiver engagement series exploring adverse childhood experiences, social determinants of health, and protector factors to mitigate the risk of child abuse and neglect. We will also offer intensive trauma-informed trainings to our teaching and direct care staff utilizing evidence-based practices that are designed to respond to the ages and stages of the client population they are serving: young children, adolescents, teens and adults.
County Served: Northampton
United Neighborhood Centers of Northeastern Pennsylvania
Description: United Neighborhood Centers of Northeastern Pennsylvania (UNC) will implement a new child abuse and neglect prevention initiative serving families and children enrolled in UNC’s licensed childcare centers and adult education programs in Scranton, Lackawanna County, as well as families referred by Lackawanna County Children and Youth Services. The project integrates two evidence-based programs: Common Sense Parenting® (CSP) and Childhelp® Speak Up Be Safe. Both programs will be implemented as primary prevention initiatives, serving families before any involvement with the child welfare system, and will focus on parenting education and child safety education. CSP will be delivered by trained UNC staff as a structured, six-week, group-based parent education program. Childhelp® Speak Up Be Safe will be delivered as a classroom-based prevention curriculum for preschool and school-age children across all three childcare centers.
County Served: Lackawanna