Florida Children’s
System of Care

Core Values

• Family-Driven and Youth-Guided, with the strengths and needs of the child and family determining the types and mix of services and supports provided.
• Community-Based, with the locus of services as well as system management resting within a supportive, adaptive infrastructure of processes, and relationships at the community level.
• Culturally and Linguistically Competent, with agencies, programs, and services that reflect the cultural, racial, ethnic, and linguistic differences of the populations they serve to facilitate access to and utilization of appropriate services and supports and to eliminate disparities in care.

Guiding Principles

1. Ensure availability of and access to a broad, flexible array of effective, community-based services and supports for children and their families that addresses their emotional, social, educational, and physical needs, including traditional and nontraditional services as well as natural and informal supports.
2. Provide individualized services in accordance with the unique potential and needs of each child and family, guided by a strengths-based, wraparound service planning process and an individualized service plan developed in true partnership with the child and family.
3. Ensure that services and supports include evidence-informed and promising practices, as well as interventions supported by practice based evidence, to ensure the effectiveness of services and improve outcomes for children and their families.
4. Deliver services and supports within the least restrictive, most normative environments that are clinically appropriate.
5. Ensure that families, other caregivers, and youth are full partners in all aspects of the planning and delivery of their own services and in the policies and procedures that govern care for all children and youth in their communities, states, territories, tribes, and nation.
6. Ensure that services are integrated at the system level, with linkages between child-serving agencies and programs across administrative and funding boundaries and mechanisms for system-level management, coordination, and integrated care management.
7. Provide care management or similar mechanisms to ensure that multiple services are delivered in a coordinated and therapeutic manner and that children and their families can move through the system of services in accordance with their changing needs.
8. Provide developmentally appropriate mental health services and supports that promote optimal social-emotional outcomes for young children and their families in their homes and community settings.
9. Provide developmentally appropriate services and supports to facilitate the transition of youth to adulthood and to the adult-service system as needed.
10. Incorporate or link with mental health promotion, prevention, and early identification and intervention to improve long-term outcomes, including mechanisms to identify problems at an earlier stage and mental health promotion and prevention activities directed at all children and adolescents.
11. Incorporate continuous accountability and quality improvement mechanisms to track, monitor, and manage the achievement of system of care goals; fidelity to the system of care philosophy; and quality, effectiveness, and outcomes at the system level, practice level, and child and family level.
12. Protect the rights of children and families and promote effective advocacy efforts.
13. Provide services and supports without regard to race, religion, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, physical disability, socioeconomic status, geography, language, immigration status, or other characteristics; and ensure that services are sensitive and responsive to these differences.

2012-2015

The statewide System of Care Expansion Grant was awarded in 2012. This award will enable DCF to continue the partnerships established in the planning efforts to operationalize the strategic plan developed.

2011-2012

System of Care Expansion Planning Grant - in the fall of 2011, the Florida Department of Children & Families (DCF) was awarded a System of Care Expansion Planning grant. The purpose of the grant was to enhance the state’s ability to take the lessons learned from its graduated and active grant sites and take the system of care philosophy and principles to scale statewide. Under the leadership of the DCF Substance Abuse and Mental Health Program Office, families, youth, providers, and state agency representatives joined together to develop a logic model, strategic plan and social marketing plan to build a sustainable blueprint for System of Care expansion.

2010-2016

Jacksonville’s System of Care Initiative (SOCI) establishes a public-private-academic sector partnership to integrate systems of care principles with those of the Medical Home Model of care for children with special health care needs and the Core and Essential Functions of public health.

2010-2016

Families and Communities Together (FACT) is refining the existing system of coordination between juvenile justice, school, child welfare and children’s mental health services in Seminole County.

2009-2015

Families And Communities Empowered for Success (FACES) is working to enhance, expand and strengthen existing community-based family and youth mental health services in Miami-Dade County. FACES is a system of care transformation initiative, changing the way things are done at all levels of the system from policy, to service, to community.

2009-2015

Wraparound Orange implements coordinated community based services for children 12 and under who get into trouble with the law and have an underlying emotional disorder. Wraparound Orange was founded to try to make sure that a child’s first contact with the Juvenile Justice system is their last. Wraparound Orange helps families put together a team of supporters and provides an array of services tailored to each family’s unique needs. Wraparound’s strength-based, family-centered approach respects parent and child, respects cultural and language differences, and helps families build community connections that will provide support long after the intervention is over.

2005-2011

The Sarasota Early Childhood Mental Health Partnership worked to improve and increase the mental health and non-mental health services and supports for infants and the very young. The website developed through this project provides a comprehensive resource for parents of young children. As a result of the grant, the Sarasota Partnership for Children was created which brings together over 30 youth serving organizations using a results based accountability approach in continued strategic planning efforts for their community.

2002-2008

One Community Partnership (OCP) was Broward County’s initiative to evaluate and redesign their existing array of children’s mental health services. As a result of the project, case management services for children with severe mental health issues now utilize the Wraparound approach. Flexible funding is available to purchase nontraditional supports not paid for by other funding streams and a local Funders Forum continues to meet in order to sustain the system. Trained parent partners and parent support groups are available to provide ongoing family support through the Mental Health Association.

1999-2005

Family Helping Organize Families for Empowerment (HOPE) was a community collaborative designed to prevent children with serious emotional disturbances, birth through 21, from moving into overly restrictive treatment services and prevent duplication of services in Palm Beach County. This initiative led to the creation of a local chapter of the Federation of Families, which has grown into the statewide chapter, the Federation of Families of Florida.

1998-2004

The Tampa Hillsborough Integrated Network for Kids (THINK) was a community based program providing services to children under the age of 21 diagnosed with Severe Emotional Disturbances (SED). The initiative introduced the Wraparound approach into its care management services, developed an Administrative Service Organization with blended funding to support nontraditional supports for families, and funded the local Federation of Families chapter. These successes have sustained and shifted community focus from “right” programs to “right’ services.