Most projects begin with discussions of the TFC program design with persons tasked with the initial development of the service. Where a public entity - state, province, county, city - is sponsoring the project, initial discussions optimally should precede the development of any RFP to be circulated to prospective providers. We recommend that agencies purchase our Treatment Foster Care Program Development Package to use as a resource and guide throughout the development process. We prefer to become involved directly with provider agencies as soon as possible following the award of contracts or the decision to begin program development. We will confer with agency staff by phone/FAX/email. When our contract allows, we will make an initial consultation visit to each prospective TFC site to meet with administrators and with other key individuals in the agency and greater community to discuss planning steps and to provide an overview of treatment foster care as a program type.

Once this initial groundwork has been laid, People Places offers Program Development Workshops to parent agency and new TFC program staff hired to launch the program. Program Development sessions provide a comprehensive introduction to treatment foster care, its key persons, tasks and components. They may be presented in any of several ways. Most workshops are held on-site at new TFC agencies or at central locations in cases where a number of new programs may be involved. Program Development Workshops may be presented as two 2-day meetings, as a single three-day event, or as need and resources dictate. Participants receive a copy of our Program Development Manual, Staff Manual and Teaching Parent Handbook, which serve as references. These materials also are provided in diskette format to each participant agency. Topics covered in the Planning Workshop(s)/Institute include:

• The Referral Process
• Referral Decision-making
•  Pre-placement Activities
•  Selection/Placement Decisions
•  Involving Birth Families
•  Short/Long-term Care

• Role, Responsibilities, Competencies
• Recruitment
• Orientation
• Application & Assessment/"Home Study"
• Contracts, Agreements, & Payment
• Emergency, Crisis, and Other Policies
• Creating a Treatment Parent Handbook
• Training & Support
• Performance Evaluation

• Case Worker - Qualifications & Responsibilities, Hiring
• Supervisor
• Treatment Team
• Training, Support, & Feedback
• Reporting Requirements
• Stress Management

• Treatment Planning/ABC Model Overview
• Comprehensive Treatment Plan
• In-home Plans
• Integrating & Coordinating Treatment Efforts
• Measurement & Reporting

Following the Program Development sessions, agencies go to work on treatment parent recruitment campaigns and the development of basic policies and procedures that need to be in place by the time parent applicants begin to respond to recruitment efforts. Adapting the foundation material offered on the diskette versions of People Places' Staff Manual and Teaching Parent Handbook, TFC staff prepare drafts of these materials specific to their own program and locale. A recruitment campaign is launched, forms for parent applications and youth referral are put together. 

We discuss the use, content and options for creating or purchasing database applications for program administration and management - helping programs identify what data needs to be gathered and how it is to be collected, stored, accessed and used. People Places' staff will be on-call during this time for phone consultation. Dates are set for pre-service training for prospective treatment parents.

People Places' trainers can conduct the initial preservice training for TFC staff and prospective treatment parents to help prepare the teams and to model the use of these curricula for later implementation by local TFC agency staff. We generally schedule staff and parent training together, one day a week, for six consecutive weeks. Three-hour afternoon Staff Training sessions focus on the ABC assessment and treatment planning model, social skills training, and generalization procedures, self-management, work with birth families of youth in care, and organization development issues. Three-hour evening training sessions for prospective treatment parents and staff cover 15 core parenting skills to be mastered by treatment parents.

The Staff Training curriculum uses a variety of materials including: (1) The ABCs of In-home Problem Solving composed of two videos, a User's Workbook and a Reference Manual; (2) the Staff Manual component of this program development package, which serves as a reference for organizational issues, (3) a third video, "Parents' Perspectives on Home-based Services", and (4) a Staff Training Outline which includes both a trainer's guide and handouts for participants. All materials used in the Staff Training (with the exception of videos of program youth) are available through People Places or are provided to agencies as part of the technical assistance contract. The evening Parent Training sessions employ People Places' competency-based Parenting Skills Training (PST) curriculum, which is fully scripted, video-based and includes a Trainer's Manual and English or Spanish language Participant Manuals. TFC agencies purchase the PST package as part of technical assistance so they may use it to conduct their own parent pre-service training subsequently.

In some projects, several agencies may be invited to participate in Staff Training together at a central location and to observe the Parent Training with a group of parents from one of the participating agencies. Additional Parent Training offerings may then be conducted at the participant agencies' own sites or TFC agency staff may deliver the PST training themselves to their own parent groups. Shorter, condensed Staff Training and Training for Trainers in the Parenting Skills Training curriculum also can be arranged.

Once Staff and Parent Training have been delivered, agencies complete the home assessment/certification process with therapeutic foster parent applicants and begin to solicit and process referrals to the program. People Places provides ongoing phone consultation beginning with regular "check-in" calls and then on an as-needed basis for a year following the completion of Staff/Parent Training.

Most projects also include one or more follow-up visits to provider agencies. These visits are designed to meet specific needs of the agencies involved and are primarily consultative in nature. They may include conferencing/problem-solving focused on individual cases, discussion of organizational issues, meetings with treatment parent support groups, inservice training or other topics agencies identify.