What is the Quality Parenting Initiative?
Quality Parenting Initiative (QPI) is a national movement for foster care change, made up of a network of states, counties and private agencies committed to ensuring that all children in care have excellent parenting and lasting relationships so they can thrive and grow.
QPI is built on the belief that excellent parenting with strong, positive relationships are the best intervention we can offer children to enable them to heal as they grow up to become adults. Creating a system that ensures excellent parenting requires the support and involvement of birth families, relative caregivers, foster families, young people, and others in the child welfare system. Research has demonstrated that children and youth need consistent and effective parenting to thrive. When parents cannot care for their children, another caregiver, in partnership with the child welfare system, must be able to provide loving, committed, and skilled care that enables the children to feel trust in their relationships with the adults in their lives. Learn more about QPI here: https://qpi4kids.org/what-is-qpi/
Our Story
The County of San Diego applied to participate in the Quality Parenting Initiative with the CA Youth Law Center, and was accepted in August 2012. QPI San Diego was formally initiated in April 2013 and, within the first year, San Diego had convened three focus groups, established the QPI Brand (Mission) Statement, established San Diego County Work Plan, and developed a Steering Committee that is still ongoing today.
San Diego QPI Mission Statement
Resource parents in San Diego County make an enduring, emotional commitment to each child and provide excellent parenting in a safe nurturing family. They are volunteers who are valued, respected, skilled members of a professional team that works collaboratively to meet the needs of the individual child. They nurture and support connections with the child’s family, community and culture. They give children a sense of stability and safety so that children can reach their potential and live healthy, productive lives.
Core Principles of QPI
- Consistent excellent parenting and meaningful relationships are the most important services we can provide to children and youth in foster care. Every policy, practice action, and statement the system adopts should strengthen parenting skills and relationships.
- Research on child, youth, and brain development and the effects of trauma not only demonstrates the importance of parenting and positive relationships but also provides guidance on how best to support them. Agency policy and practice should be informed by research.
- The individuals most affected by policies and practices are in the best position to design and implement change so that systems ensure excellent parenting and meaningful relationships for children who enter their care.
Key Elements of the QPI Process
- The Quality Parenting Initiative (QPI) is an effort to strengthen foster care, not simply by changing a logo or an advertisement, but by changing the core elements underlying the brand. QPI recognizes that the traditional foster care “brand” has negative connotations and this deters families from participating.
The Key Elements of this process are:
- To define the expectations of caregivers
- To clearly articulate those expectations
- To align the system so that those goals can
become a reality
Ways to Get Involved
- Become a Resource Parent
- Volunteer with children/youth in foster care
- Attend a QPI Event or Regional Training
- Sign up for the QPI National Newsletter
- Seek additional Resources
Upcoming Events
- Quarterly Steering Committee – Meets in January, April, July & October
- For more information, please email the FARFS
inbox: CWSFARFS.HHSA@sdcounty.ca.gov - Regional Trainings – Once per quarter
