Medium

Family Preservation Services are services designed to help families, including adoptive or extended families, alleviate crises that might lead to abuse and or neglect of children, and children being taken out of their homes. These services, which focus on family strengths, are intense and time limited.

Outcomes

  • Keep children safely in their own homes;
  • Receive support in preparing for a child to be returned to their home if they have been removed; and
  • Receive help in connecting with other community services and supports necessary to address family needs in a culturally sensitive manner

Accessing Services

Call the local Human Service Zone

North Dakota's Family Preservation Services

Parent Aide Services

  • Designed to improve parenting skills with parents who are at risk of abusing or neglecting their children, by reinforcing parents' confidence in their strengths and helping them to identify where improvement is needed and to obtain assistance in improving those skills
  • Uses the relationship between the parent and the parent aide as a tool to encourage, teach and assist parents

Intensive In-Home Services

  • Provides families who have one or more children at risk of being placed out of their home with intense crisis intervention services
  • Therapists work with families in their homes and make every effort to work around a family's schedule

Prime Time Child Care Services

  • Provides temporary child care to children of families where child abuse and/or neglect has occurred or there is at risk of it occurring
  • Gives parents an opportunity to attend counseling, addiction treatment, or other needed services while their children are cared for in a licensed facility

Respite Care Services

  • Provides temporary child care for families up to 12 hours per week (non-overnights) or four days in a row (overnights)
  • Intended to provide caregivers with periods of temporary relief 

Safety/Permanency Funds

  • Flexible funding for rent, utilities, food, clothing, transportation to services, etc., which is available from local county social service offices to families who are having difficulties and are at risk of their children being placed out of home
  • This funding can be used for such things as Strength-Based Planning Wraparound Process. This is a planning process used by county social service offices, the child, and family to help them set up individualized community services and supports to meet their needs

Crossroads Program

  • Provides child care assistance for eligible teenage parents who are pursuing high school, GED or alternative high school education
  • Works to keep young parents in school with the hope that they will become self-supporting
  • Learn more about the Crossroads Program