Safety Organized Practice (SOP) is a collaborative, trauma-informed and culturally responsive best practice approach to working with children, youth, families, and their networks that is rooted in evidence-based practice and provides practical tools and strategies to support engagement, assessment and critical thinking. SOP actively positions the family as the expert, and holds those working with families responsible for honoring the unique culture and perspective of each family by uplifting and building on their strengths to achieve safety, permanency and well-being.
SOP provides on-the-ground practice tools intended to support achievement of federal child welfare outcome measures, including improved timely permanency and placement stability and reduced recurrence of maltreatment and re-entry to foster care.
Goals of the Toolkit
The goal of this statewide SOP toolkit is to support consistency and fidelity of Safety Organized Practice across California, and to ensure social workers, supervisors and leaders in all counties have access to the same resources to support the practice.
Since 2008, SOP has evolved in California as a grassroots effort, with the goal of building a skills-based approach to child welfare practice that emphasizes meaningful involvement of families and their networks of support to ensure child safety, permanency and well-being. The strength of this grassroots approach is that many resources have been developed at local and regional levels to support implementation and use of SOP.
This toolkit aims to ensure that all counties have access to the same rich array of resources to support the practice, implementation and evaluation of SOP. The tools in this toolkit were created, edited and/or compiled by the contributing members of the SOP Backbone Committee.
About the SOP Backbone Committee
The SOP Backbone Committee is a collaborative workgroup that takes a statewide collective impact approach to implementation and fidelity of SOP in California. The Committee is made up of members from the California Department of Social Services (CDSS), the Regional Training Academies (RTAs; Northern, Bay Area, Central, and Southern), CalSWEC, Casey Family Programs and county representatives from each region, including Butte, Contra Costa, Fresno, Los Angeles, Placer, Sacramento, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz and Ventura counties. The Northern Academy at UC Davis Human Services has primary responsibility for SOP Backbone Committee coordination. For SOP regional contact information, see the SOP Regional Contacts page.