Family Maintenance & Preservation Services

Family Maintenance Services

At Alameda County Social Services Agency - Department of Children and Family Services, we offer Family Maintenance Services to support families to create and maintain safety in the home, provide permanency for their children, and to foster their children’s well-being in the home. The focus of Family Maintenance Services is to support caregivers to successfully maintain their children in their homes and to ensure that the children’s minimum sufficient level of care is met; free from any safety concerns that would require more restrictive interventions from the Agency. 

Within Family Maintenance Services, we offer two types of services. Informal Family Maintenance Services are case management services and supports that are provided to caregiver(s) and their children without court involvement or oversight. On the other hand, Formal Family Maintenance Services is juvenile dependency court ordered services to supports children to remain safely within their family’s homes. The Informal Family Maintenance Services are services that caregivers voluntarily access while the Formal Family Maintenance Services are ordered by the courts. Additionally, for Formal Family Maintenance Services, parents are also ordered by the courts to comply with the mutually developed case plan and social workers are ordered to provide the necessary case management support to assist the families to achieve the case plan goals and objectives. In Informal Family Maintenance and Formal Family Maintenance Services, the caregiver’s progress towards achieving the case plan goals and objectives are evaluated at six month intervals. Similarly, for Formal Family Maintenance Services, the caregivers’ progress and the social worker’s supports to the families are evaluated every 6 months but for formal cases, they are evaluated by the courts. 

Family Preservation Services

Family Preservation (FP) is a state-funded program designed to provide intensive services to families involved with the child welfare system. The goals are to prevent foster care placement or safely return children who have been in foster care.

Family Preservation Workers provide a wide range of clinical case management services to families in their homes in order to address the risks that brought the family to the attention of the Agency. FP Services are provided to families on a voluntary and are time-limited.

The goals of the Family Preservation Program are:

• to help families provide safe, nurturing care for children in their own homes
• to address the factors in the family and the home that put children at risk in order to prevent foster care placement or to facilitate reunification
• to help families connect with available community resources

Family Preservation Services are an internal service that is provided to families who have an open, active dependency case with the Agency through the courts.