Motivational Interviewing
for Child Welfare
Child welfare agencies are increasingly expected to adopt evidence-based services and demonstrate fidelity and evaluation of services.
Motivational Interviewing is a service rated “well supported” by the national IV-E Evidence-Based Clearninghouse. This means that research has demonstrated that MI works as an intervention for improving positive outcomes for families and is eligible for funding under Family First.
We work primarily with child welfare agencies to implement MI on an organizational level for use across units and alongside other evidence-based practices.
Organizational interventions
A child welfare intervention model should match agency policies and practices. We work with administrators and supervisors to help them think about what current practices need to be scaled up or down in order to implement MI with fidelity and efficacy. We help you choose outcome assessments, and provide coaching to supervisors about how to use and model MI as a tool during supervision. These strategies are built using an Implementation Practice model, which is a set of strategies for making EBPs “stick” in agencies so they do not fall away immediately after training.
Focus on Families
Ultimately, Family First legislation was built on the premise that children deserve to grow up in safe, stable, secure families. This means working with parents toward healthy choices. We work from a trauma-informed perspective, focused on relationships, to improve engagement in services early on. MI is directive in helping to set goals and expectations related to child safety, but also honors the motivations of each parent, and draws upon their goals when presenting service options. Though MI work is directional (we are trying to help parents get to a certain place, such as sobriety), client autonomy and choice is central to the process. Foremost, a trauma-informed motivational-interviewing framework centralizes the importance of relationships and support, which we know is a key to therapeutic progress.
Our Motivational Interviewing classes with child welfare agencies are offered online synchronously, are very interactive, and are available anywhere in the nation. Implementation packages, including supervisor and administrator consultation, small coaching groups, and individualized training plans delivered over nine to twelve months start at the cost of approximately $15k-25k depending on the size of your organization and number of staff who will receive training. We provide license to use all of our materials and recordings to support onboarding of new staff, and support you in creating a plan to measure fidelity and other client and agency outcomes.
See what our training schedule looks like by visiting our training rates page.