Beyond Decategorization: Defining Barriers and Potential Solutions to Creating Effective Comprehensive, Community-Based Support Systems for Children and Families.

This document uses interviews with 18 practitioners as the basis for an examination of the barriers to and promise of strategies intended to build effective, comprehensive, community-based service initiatives for children and families in a deregulated policy environment. Four major barriers are identified: (1) structural/legal barriers, reflected in legal constraints, regulations, and procedural requirements; (2) barriers to collaboration related to staff knowledge and commitment, which may result from a lack of technical expertise or rigid attitudes among administrators and service providers that limit the ability of initiatives to work collaboratively; (3) political support barriers, which relate to challenges of establishing and maintaining external support for an initiative among political and policy officials, key constituency groups, and the general public; (4) management information and evaluation data system barriers, which concern difficulties in constructing cross-agency data networks and outcomes-based assessment systems necessary for effective planning, budgeting, management, and evaluation. Policy directions at the state level holding promise for overcoming these constraints are also delineated: (1) coordinate state agency program strategies and resource allocation policies; (2) move toward an accountability system based on achieving desired results for children and families through reducing procedural regulation of service delivery; (3) invest in cross-agency information infrastructures; (4) encourage more integrated pre-service training experiences for service administrators and front-line providers; (5) provide monetary incentives for collaboration; (6) help ensure multi-year funding for comprehensive initiatives. A description of The Finance Project and a list of resources available from the Project's Working Papers Series conclude the document. Contains 22 references. (KDFB)