Wisconsin's application for the Strengthening Families Initiative pilot was initiated and is being led by the Children's Trust Fund, although the full state leadership team includes about 40 members. Wisconsin was interested in being a pilot state for the CSSP Strengthening Families Initiative because it fits well with new directions that we are taking as a state in both child abuse and neglect prevention and early childhood. During the past year several things have happened to create a favorable environment for integrating the Strengthening Families ideas into Wisconsin's early care and education infrastructure.

• Governor Jim Doyle's Summit to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect: A State Call to Action has been a major catalyst. As an organizer of the summit along with the Child Abuse Prevention Fund, the Children's Trust fund involved the early childhood education community because providers play a key role in our vision of a comprehensive system of services to prevent child maltreatment.
• The summit was followed by Governor Doyle unveiling his KidsFirst Initiative which has three components that focus on the early child care and education programs: 1) a "Quality Counts" program that will rate the quality of child care providers in Wisconsin; 2) additional funding for TEACH and REWARD; and 3) a grant program to help school districts offset the cost of 4-year-old kindergarten.

Laura Saterfield, the State Child Care Administrator of the Child Care Section in the Department of Workforce Development (DWD), is one of the key drivers behind the KidsFirst Quality Counts program. As a key partner in the Wisconsin Strengthening Families Initiative, Laura welcomes CSSP's strategic planning support to improve shared outcomes for child maltreatment prevention through early care and education programs.

Besides the Children's Trust Fund and DWD, other key players providing leadership in the Wisconsin proposal include the Office of the Governor, the Department of Health and Family Services (DHFS), the Early Childhood Comprehensive System (ECCS) project, the Department of Public Instruction (DPI), the Child Abuse Prevention Fund of Children's Hospital and Health System, and many other statewide agencies and advocacy organizations.

1. Stronger partnerships among early childhood education decision makers and their child protection and child abuse prevention counterparts. According to Kitty Kocol, Administrator of the Division of Children and Family Services in DHFS, the CSSP initiative will help us collaborate to ensure that child care quality and continuity is considered when making foster care placement decisions. Also, Wisconsin's final ECCS plan will include Strengthening Families strategies.
2. Enhanced collaboration among child abuse and neglect prevention advocates and programs and early childhood professional and programs at pilot sites throughout the state. One way we hope to accomplish this goal is by encouraging regional CC&CRs to 'merge' with comprehensive family resource centers and those 'blended' locations as technical assistance and training resources for early care and education programs that will implement the approach.
3. Enhanced education and professional development for child care providers to support them in delivering parent education and providing family support. The plan calls for researching the applicability of using the Children's Trust Fund's Core Competencies in the Field of Family Support for child care providers and revising as needed. It also call for work with legislators to introduce legislation that will require licensure of family child care providers to include information on warning signs of families at risk for child maltreatment and basic family support principles.
4. Research-based evaluation model for assessing the effectiveness of collaboration between the child care and family support fields in strengthening families and preventing child maltreatment. Wisconsin will be drawing upon the expertise of Dr. Arthur Reynolds, researcher and professor who is replicating his Chicago Child-Parent Center (CPC) preschool in Madison. Both the Children's Trust Fund and DWD support Dr. Reynolds' Madison CPC. Besides Dr. Reynolds, the Wisconsin team has many other wonderful researchers available to us through the University of Wisconsin system.

Wisconsin welcomes the "value added" that Strengthening Families expertise offers in building a system that expands the capacity of early childhood programs to support families, not only by preventing child maltreatment, but also by enhancing the nurturing capabilities of parents.