Bring Up Nebraska / Community Well-Being
Nebraska Children and Families Foundation in partnership with community collaboratives and state and national partners are proud to announce Bring Up Nebraska, a statewide prevention initiative designed to give local community partnerships the ability to develop long-term plans using the latest strategies and data to prevent life’s challenges from becoming a crisis for many Nebraska families and children.
Bring Up Nebraska is an alternative approach that seeks to strengthen families and enhance well-being without the intervention of the child welfare system. By working within communities, and bringing all of its strengths and services together in a coordinated way, families can be served before warning signs become a crisis. Participants in a community collaboratives are nonprofit service providers, doctors, mental health practitioners, schools, churches, housing and transportation services, and even utilities companies. The goal is to give families what they need to thrive so they can stay together, remain self-sufficient, and support the health and learning of their children.
The three-level prevention system model
Primary strategies improve the overall community context to benefit all families; at-risk strategies target families with one or more risk factors; high-risk strategies are intense interventions for families who may already have child welfare system involvement.
Primary Prevention
Primary prevention is a universal approach that addresses the community context and touches every family in the community to ensure basic needs are met. This means ensuring access to early childhood education, housing, jobs with living wages, and positive informal supports – all the things that families need to grow healthy, thriving kids. When Primary Prevention strategies are in place, fewer families will need to access higher-level interventions.
At-Risk Prevention
This level of prevention is focused on families that are experiencing risk factors, like alcoholism, drug abuse, mental illness, teenage parenthood, English as a second language, etc. At-Risk Prevention strategies are all about ensuring access to counseling, treatment, parenting classes, and other concrete supports that build a family's Protective Factors to mitigate their risk factors and make sure their children have what they need to reach their full potential.
High-Risk Prevention
High-Risk Prevention strategies focus on families who may have a history with the child welfare system or are on the verge of entering. These intensive interventions work to provide customized, wrap-around services through community providers to strengthen the family, get them out of crisis and onto a path to long-term stability.
As a whole
In one of our Bring Up Nebraska communities, a family may enter via any service partner at any level to get the services and supports it needs. All of the collaboratives are:
- Community-owned collaborations that engage all the community's voices -- nonprofit organizations, health care providers, educators, government, churches, businesses and, most importantly, families and youth
- Committed to our enhanced version of the Collective Impact model of collaboration
- Built to prevent Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)
- Focused on actively promoting the Protective Factors
- Tied to a shared set of measurements
Click here to learn more about the Bring Up Nebraska initiative.
