community voices
Maine Child Welfare Action Network
The Maine Child Welfare Action Network (MCWAN) formed in 2018 through a collaborative push to identify and elevate key child welfare reform priorities in a letter to the incoming governor. That effort laid the groundwork for MCWAN’s first major publication: the Child Welfare Priority Reforms white paper released in early 2019 outlining priority reforms for Maine’s child welfare system.
Since then, the Network has continued to build momentum, publishing a series of issue briefs and frameworks that guide our collective work and call others to action — including a Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect brief (2021), a Family Reunification Issue Brief (2022), and a Framework for Child Welfare Reform (2022), which was updated in 2023 as our Strategic Child Welfare System Priorities.
Building a Stronger Child Welfare System Together
Keeping children safe and helping families thrive requires more than responding when a crisis occurs. It requires strong communities, accessible supports, informed policies, and collaboration across the many systems that serve Maine children and families.
MCWAN brings together organizations, advocates, professionals, parents, and other stakeholders to advance a more effective and responsive child welfare system. Through research, advocacy, shared learning, and collective action, the Network works to address challenges at their roots while helping create conditions in which children and families can thrive.
Our Vision
MCWAN envisions a Maine where every child grows up in a safe, supportive environment, and families have access to the resources they need to thrive. We believe that child welfare is a shared responsibility, requiring coordinated efforts across communities, public and private organizations, and state agencies.
Achieving this vision means looking beyond any single agency or program. Families interact with healthcare, education, behavioral health, housing, economic supports, and community services, making collaboration across these systems essential.
By bringing diverse perspectives together, MCWAN works to identify shared priorities and advance solutions that strengthen both families and the systems designed to support them.
Our Approach
MCWAN focuses on proactive, community-driven strategies to prevent child abuse and neglect.Our key priorities include:
- Establishing Measurable Outcomes: Developing clear metrics to assess child safety and well-being.
- Investing in Supportive Services: Enhancing access to mental health care, substance use treatment, housing, and economic supports.
- Addressing Workforce Challenges: Supporting the recruitment, retention, and training of child welfare professionals.
- Improving Cross-System Collaboration: Fostering partnerships among agencies and organizations to streamline services.
- Prioritizing Permanency and Prevention: Focusing on keeping families together and preventing the need for child protective interventions.
Together, these priorities recognize that child and family well-being is shaped by many interconnected factors. Effective reform requires addressing immediate needs while also strengthening the services, workforce, policies, and community conditions that can help prevent crises.
Prevention Starts With Strong Families
A strong child welfare system does more than respond to abuse and neglect. It helps create the conditions that allow families to remain safe, stable, and connected before challenges escalate.
Access to mental health care, substance use treatment, safe housing, economic resources, healthcare, and community-based supports can all play a role in strengthening families. MCWAN works to elevate prevention as an essential part of child welfare reform and encourages approaches that provide families with meaningful support when they need it.
This focus helps shift the conversation toward shared responsibility for child and family well-being across communities and systems.
Collaborative Leadership
The Maine Children's Alliance serves as the backbone organization for MCWAN, providing coordination and support for the Network's initiatives. Through collective action, MCWAN connects stakeholders across Maine to drive systemic change and promote child and family well-being.
This backbone support helps organizations and individuals work toward shared priorities while bringing together perspectives from across Maine's child welfare landscape.
Collaboration allows the Network to identify common challenges, share knowledge and promising practices, elevate community perspectives, and build greater momentum around reforms that can improve outcomes for children and families.
Center for Parent Leadership and Advocacy (CPLA)
MCWAN's Center for Parent Leadership and Advocacy empowers parents with lived experience in the child welfare system to inform policy and practice. By elevating parent voices, CPLA ensures that reforms are grounded in the realities of those most affected.
Parents with direct experience navigating the child welfare system bring knowledge and perspectives that cannot be replicated through data or professional expertise alone.
By creating opportunities for parents to participate in conversations about policy, programs, and system improvement, CPLA helps ensure that decisions affecting families are informed by families themselves.
Research and Policy to Support System Change
Meaningful child welfare reform requires reliable information and a clear understanding of the experiences of Maine children and families.
MCWAN's publications help translate research, lived experience, and collective expertise into priorities that policymakers, advocates, service providers, and communities can use to guide action.
From preventing child abuse and neglect to strengthening family reunification and identifying broader system reforms, these resources provide a foundation for continued discussion and improvement.
MCWAN Publications
Get Involved
Join us in our mission to strengthen families and keep children safe. To learn more about MCWAN and how you can contribute, contact Network Coordinator Melissa Hackett at mhackett@mekids.org.
Creating lasting change requires participation from people throughout Maine. Parents, community members, advocates, service providers, policymakers, and organizations all have a role to play in building a child welfare system centered on safety, stability, prevention, and family well-being.
By engaging with MCWAN, you can contribute your experience, expertise, and voice to the collective effort to improve outcomes for Maine children and families.
Resources
The following resources provide additional research, frameworks, and perspectives related to child welfare, prevention, family well-being, and system transformation.
- The U.S. Children’s Bureau, Casey Family Programs, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Prevent Child Abuse America®, Thriving Families, Safer Children: A National Commitment to Well-Being
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Essentials for Childhood
- Institute for Family, the Unlearning of Child Welfare
- Tennyson Center for Children, Rewiring
- Maine Child Welfare Action Network, Evidence Based Practice in Child Welfare
The Maine Children’s Alliance advocates for sound public policies and promotes best practices to improve the lives of all Maine children, youth, and families.
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Phone: (207) 623-1868
Email: outreach@mekids.org
Address: P.O. Box 111, Hallowell, ME 04347-9998, United States