About Us

Communities Connected for Kids provides oversight and coordination of the child-welfare system in Indian River, Martin, Okeechobee and St. Lucie counties. At any given time, there are about 700 abused, abandoned or neglected children in our care. We are responsible for the safety and well-being of each one of them. We meet this responsibility through a mix of direct and contracted services. If you think about it in terms of building a house, we are the general contractor of the child-welfare system. The system is the house, we are the contractor, and our network of service providers are the subcontractors we pull together to make the house strong and ready to live in.

Communities Connected for Kids - Org Chart

Who We Serve

Communities Connected for Kids receives all referrals from the state Department of Children and Families' Child Protective Onvestigations in Okeechobee and the Treasure Coast. DCF conducts investigations following calls made to the Florida Child Abuse Hotline and determines if children are in need of prevention services, or case management and safety services to ensure they can be safe in their homes. When safety cannot be assured, a child may be sheltered from their parents and placed with relatives or licensed foster parents. CCKids offers a full range of a wide variety of approaches tailored to meet the needs of each child and family referred by DCF, including in-home parenting and prevention services, family preservation, case management, adoptions, foster care, and extended foster care services for teenagers and young adults.

Contracted Services

You may be familiar with many of our subcontracted service providers. Our partners include, among others, Hibiscus Children’s Center, Children’s Home Society, Camelot Community Care and 4Kids of South Florida. Each agency brings many years of experience to our system of care. Services include parenting and substance-abuse counseling for parents and a full range of foster care, group care and wrap-around services for our children.

Direct Services

We provide some services and programs directly to the community. Those include:

• Road to Success
  This program prepares teens and young adults for life outside of the foster-care system. Since the program started the number of children formerly in foster care who graduate high school and then pursue post-secondary education has soared.

• Caregiver Support
  The Caregiver Support Program provides support and resources to all out of home caregivers trying to meet the needs of children placed in their homes. Out of home caregivers consists of relative and non-relative caregivers (Kinship), licensed foster parents, permanent guardians, and adoptive parents. This program has many ways to assist each type of caregiver specifically.

• Family Group Conferencing
  This program empowers the family to identify all essential players in a child’s case plan (such as parents, grandparents, helpful neighbors, school teachers) to help them keep the child safe and prevent him from entering the foster-care system. It is an evidence-based model that has yielded great results throughout the country and locally.
• Training
  Communities Connected for Kids conducts pre-service and in-service training for dependency case managers and opens them to the community. National experts provide community training opportunities in the areas of substance abuse, brain development, domestic violence, staff development and other related fields. The trainings are free to the community and help ensure that those in service are exposed to the most relevant, cutting-edge research.
• Early Services Engagement Program (ESEP)
  This program is designed to prevent children from being removed from their home. It does that by reaching out to families earlier in the investigative process. There are two major parts to the state's dependency system. There is child protective investigations, which is handled by the state Department of Children and Families. And there are dependency case management services, which are provided by Communities Connected for Kids. CPI’s have a complex job identifying risk and providing immediate safety actions to prevent removals. Sometimes, the number of diverse and complex investigations makes it challenging. This program will allow CCKids to engage more immediately in this extremely high risk scenario, and provide more comprehensive oversight of at-risk families while investigations finalizes the required elements of their investigation. 

In the tradition of true partnership, Communities Connected for Kids works closely with several agencies that are funded through Medicaid, substance abuse/mental health or private funds to offer a continuum of treatment services otherwise unfunded by Community Based Care dollars. These partnerships help families strengthen their capacity to care for their children or help children heal from trauma they’ve experienced.