CBC7, in collaboration with the Texas Center for Child and Family Studies and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, seeks applications from community organizations and collaboratives in Region 7 who would like to be part of a cohort of projects seeking to make children’s time in foster care rare, brief, and non-recurring.
Background
Community-Based Care (CBC) in Texas is a community-based approach to foster care and case management services, creating an enhanced service delivery model that fully engages the community in serving children, youth, and families in Texas. CBC guiding principles provide a model for protecting children and strengthening families, drawing on the strengths of communities to transform foster care.
To date, CBC is underway in seven areas of the state, and the Office of Community Based Care Transition has recently closed a request for applications for a contract to implement CBC in four more areas. Although there is not a specific timeline for when CBC will be implemented in Central Texas, the State Plan calls for full roll-out by Fiscal Year 2029 and there is an open opportunity for an entity to submit an unsolicited bid for the contract at any timed.
In Central Texas, there is a cross-sector coordinated effort underway to explore how the region and/or its sub-regions might prepare to implement Community Based Care by taking real action to address the needs of children and families involved in, or at risk of being involved in, the child welfare system, and develop an innovative, collaborative structure for the implementation of CBC. This collaborative effort, branded as CBC7, has engaged over seventy-five organizations from across the region, including child and family service organizations, advocacy groups, health and behavioral health providers, state agencies, judges, faith-based organizations, community associations, people with lived experience in the foster care system, and others. Together, these stakeholders have established a shared goal of achieving measurable positive change in communities across the region, where families are supported and placements of outside of permanency are rare, brief, and non-recurring.