The Durham Family Initiative: a preventive system of care

This article describes the Durham Family Initiative (DFI), an innovative effort to bring together child welfare and juvenile justice systems to reach DFI's goal of reducing the child abuse rate in Durham, North Carolina, by 50% within the next 10 years. DFI will follow principles of a preventive system of care (PSoC), which focuses on nurturing the healthy parent-child relationship. A community collaborative of government agency directors has signed a memorandum of agreement to implement the PSoC principles. The researchers will use multiple methods to evaluate DFI's efficacy.