The Illinois Office of Research and Child Well-Being
YTFG published its updated Well-Being Framework in 2021 to offer a set of concrete and actionable recommendations for youth-serving system leaders, policymakers, and public and private funders for improving policy and practice to support the well-being and well-becoming of young people throughout adolescence and into adulthood. Since its release, the framework has been used by a variety of organizations to strengthen their work, from foundations, to public agencies to community-based organizations. This blog series is intended to highlight innovative examples of how organizations have put YTFG’s well-being framework into action.
The Illinois Office of Research and Child Well-Being (ORCW) was established in 2008 in response to a call to action from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to look beyond safety and permanency and toward well-being as the desired outcome for children and their families. In the early years, this office focused primarily on social and emotional well-being and worked with the programs within the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DFCS) to expand their focus on well-being. In 2023, ORCW partnered with Individuals with lived experience, researchers, program leads, and a national partner to shift toward a more holistic view of well-being, and sought to create a unified definition that they could use as cultivators of well-being across all DFCS departments and ultimately, with other state and national systems that impact children and families in Illinois.
The YTFG well-being framework was instrumental in the ORCW process to develop an Illinois specific definition of well-being. OCRW used the framework to inform their vision and help fulfill the mission to become ambassadors for well-being across all DCFS programs and divisions. Several aspects of the YTFG framework influenced how Illinois went about their work, including the integration of lived experience into their process, adoption of the concept of well-becoming, and the inclusion of racial equity as a domain in their final framework. The final product, Cultivating Well-Being, Well-Becoming and Resiliency, was aligned with the well-being framework, while also being unique to the Illinois context. In the words of Dr. Verletta Saxon, Deputy Director of the ORCW, “it was the kind of fit we were looking at to help guide our efforts.”
Illinois’ vision for child well-being, well-becoming and resiliency is exciting on a number of fronts: first, it helped to galvanize a passion for and commitment to engaging lived experience in the co-design of transformation work in child welfare; second, it affirmed the value of participatory research, highlighting the value of partnering with individuals with lived experience as partners in the design and implementation of research studies; and finally, it holds promise for Illinois DFCS’s efforts to improve outcomes for families involved in the child welfare system, as well as other systems that impact children and families in the state.
Cultivating Well-Being, Well-Becoming and Resiliency is ORCW’s fact sheet that includes the definitions, domains, theory, and unified framework for its work around well-being.