The Yellowstone (Montana) Family Recovery Court (YFRC) seeks funding through SAMHSA’s Treatment Drug Courts grant program to enhance and increase substance abuse treatment capacity for families at the intersection of substance use and child welfare. The expansion will focus on the needs of American Indians and Alaska Native (AI/AN) families including a robust partnership with the community’s Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) court. Specifically, YFRC will use grant funds to: (1) increase the number of families served with a focus on AI/AN families engaged in ICWA services; (2) increase the cultural competence of the court team to better understand and address the strengths and needs of families who identify as AI/AN; (3) improve parenting, child, and family services; and, (4) enhance data collection and performance monitoring. Through this grant, the YFRC will serve approximately 83 unduplicated individuals (30 parents and 53 children) each year of the grant for a total of 415 individuals over the grant period. Participants will include families living in Yellowstone County with open child neglect/abuse cases, or at risk for involvement with child welfare system, whose parents’ substance use is identified as a contributing factor to the child welfare concern. Grant funded enhancements will include evidence based practices appropriate to this population including Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, Celebrating Families!, Seeking Safety, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, White Bison Wellbriety, Medication Assisted Therapy, Love and Logic, and Motivational Interviewing among others. YFRC will work with other Native serving agencies and organizations to identify culturally responsive modifications and adaptations as necessary to meet the needs of AI/AN families.
At the conclusion of 2019, Yellowstone County had 691 open dependency and neglect cases (CFSD,2019). AI/AN families are disproportionately represented in these statistics with 250 ICWA cases (36% of all cases- but only 3% of the county’s overall population identifies as AI/AN, according to the 2010 census). Based on CFSD estimates, at least 65% or 450 of those cases involved parental substance use as a contributing factor. Unfortunately, the current YFRC docket can only serve 20 families at any given time, leaving a gap of more than 400 cases. This grant will help close this gap by increasing case management, improving cultural responsiveness, increasing staff capacity, enhancing collaborative partnerships, and expanding services. Further, the YFRC will use the data collection and performance measurement embedded in these enhancements to garner community engagement, identify opportunities to improve program quality and outcomes, sustain collaborative partnerships, and provide ongoing performance monitoring.