Those responses matter. Children deserve adults and systems that act quickly when they are unsafe.

But child protection also has an earlier starting point: prevention. Families often experience mounting stress, isolation, financial hardship, health problems, parenting challenges, or other difficulties long before a situation reaches the child welfare system. When communities are able to support families during those seasons, we have an opportunity to reduce risk and help children remain safely with the people who love them.

At Christian Heritage, this is an important part of how we think about changing the future of child welfare in Nebraska. Our Families Together program is our response to this need. Through this program, we’re seeking to build stronger communities around families so fewer crises ever reach the point where a child must be removed.

Child abuse and neglect in Nebraska

Current Nebraska foster care data show why prevention matters.

As of March 31, 2026, over 3,100 Nebraska children involved with DHHS Children and Family Services were in out-of-home care or a trial home visit. Those children had been in care for a median of 414 days and had experienced an average of 3.4 placements over their lifetimes.

Among teenagers in care, nearly half had experienced four or more placements.

When children cannot safely remain at home, foster care provides essential protection and stability. But removal also brings significant change into a child’s life, which is one reason Nebraska’s Foster Care Review Office continues to emphasize the importance of investing further “upstream” in prevention and family preservation.

That means strengthening families before circumstances reach the point of removal whenever it can be done safely. Housing instability, transportation problems, behavioral health needs, financial pressure, isolation, and a lack of reliable support can place tremendous stress on parents and children. Helping families navigate those pressures can strengthen the conditions that allow children to remain safely at home.

The opportunity for prevention is significant. Churches, neighbors, businesses, and community organizations can help families access practical resources, develop stronger support systems, build parenting skills, and form healthy relationships that make difficult seasons more manageable.

When those protective factors are in place, families are better equipped to withstand adversity, and children have a greater opportunity to grow up safely within their own families.

Protective factors help keep children safe

Researchers often talk about protective factors—strengths and conditions within a family or community that can reduce the risk of maltreatment and help families respond more effectively to stress. The Strengthening Families framework identifies five especially important areas: parental resilience, healthy social connections, concrete support during times of need, knowledge of parenting and child development, and children’s social and emotional competence.

These protective factors make sense when we picture them in everyday life. A parent who understands their child’s developmental needs may be better equipped to respond to difficult behavior. A family that can access food, transportation, healthcare, stable housing, or childcare has fewer immediate pressures competing for attention. A parent with healthy coping skills has more resources to draw on when life becomes overwhelming.

And relationships matter tremendously.

A 2023 study examining parental risk and protective factors found that social support was the most significant protective factor across the levels researchers studied and across nearly every type of child maltreatment they examined.

The CDC likewise identifies caring adults, strong social networks, access to services, economic stability, and safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments as important protective conditions for children and families.

For Christian Heritage, that research reinforces something we believe deeply: families flourish in community.

Sometimes prevention is surprisingly practical

Preventing child abuse and neglect can sound like work reserved for therapists, social workers, government agencies, and other professionals. Their expertise is certainly important, but many protective factors can also be strengthened by ordinary people doing ordinary things well.

A child may need a bed. A family may need reliable transportation so a parent can keep a job. A broken washing machine may be creating an expense the family cannot absorb. A parent may need childcare during an unexpected medical situation.

Meeting one practical need will not solve every challenge a family faces, but timely support can relieve pressure and give parents room to work on the larger issues in their lives. Research on economic and tangible supports has found that helping families meet material needs can play an important role in reducing child maltreatment risk.

This is one reason Christian Heritage partners with CarePortal through our Families Together program. CarePortal helps alert churches, businesses, volunteers, and Christian Heritage when vulnerable families in their communities have tangible needs, mentoring needs, or situations where temporary child hosting may be helpful.

A practical request can also create an opportunity that goes beyond the item being delivered. A church brings a family a bed, and people who previously did not know one another meet at the front door. Someone learns the parent’s name. A conversation begins. Over time, that first interaction may develop into a relationship.

That kind of connection is one of the protective factors research tells us matters.

Parents need people in their corner

Some of the greatest needs families face cannot be purchased or delivered.

Parenting is difficult even with a healthy support system. When someone is carrying financial pressure, trauma, relationship problems, loneliness, or other significant stress without trusted people around them, the weight can become enormous.

Parent mentoring is one way our Families Together program helps strengthen those connections. A trained mentor walks alongside a parent over time, helping them identify goals, solve problems, build skills, and experience the encouragement that comes from having another healthy adult consistently in their life.

This reflects another important finding in the research. Social connections can provide emotional, informational, and concrete support to parents, and federal child welfare guidance specifically identifies connections with friends, neighbors, colleagues, community groups, and faith communities as potential sources of that support. The recent Harvard flourishing study found similar results.

Healthy relationships do not make hardship disappear. They do make it less likely that a parent has to carry every hardship alone.

The Church can help build stronger families

Christian Heritage is a gospel-centered ministry, so our interest in strengthening families grows directly from our faith.

Throughout Scripture, God’s people are called to love their neighbors, carry one another’s burdens, practice hospitality, care for vulnerable people, and become a community in which people are known and loved. Those commands have very practical implications when a family down the street, or event across town, is struggling.

There are churches in every Nebraska community. Within those churches are people with parenting experience, spare bedrooms, trucks, professional skills, financial resources, wisdom gained through difficult seasons, and the capacity to develop meaningful relationships.

Christian Heritage’s role is to help mobilize those resources. Through Families Together and CarePortal, we can help churches identify needs, prepare volunteers, support mentors and host families, and navigate situations that might otherwise feel intimidating.

Our hope is that vulnerable families encounter churches as safe, welcoming communities where people genuinely care about them for who they are in this moment—not for who they may or may not become.

That service is available regardless of a family’s faith or background. Christian Heritage serves because our Christian faith compels us to love our neighbors; families do not have to share our beliefs, attend church, or participate in religious activities to receive support.

We believe Christians can be open about why we serve while also treating every person with dignity, respect, and genuine love.

Prevention still requires us to act when a child is unsafe

Supporting families early does not remove our responsibility to protect children when abuse or neglect is occurring.

Nebraska is a mandatory-reporting state for everyone. State law requires any person who has reason to believe a child has been abused or neglected to report the concern. Nebraska DHHS accepts reports through the statewide Child Abuse and Neglect Hotline at 1-800-652-1999, which operates 24 hours a day, as well as through its online reporting system.

A strong prevention approach includes both early family support and a clear commitment to child safety. Communities should become better at recognizing when parents need help and equally prepared to respond when children need protection.

Imagine a world where we support families sooner

Nebraska will continue to need foster parents. There will always be circumstances in which children cannot safely remain at home, and those children deserve foster families who can offer stability, compassion, and excellent care.

We can also keep asking what might have helped earlier.

Could a parent have benefited from a mentor six months before the crisis? Could a church have helped with transportation when Mom’s car broke down? Could a trusted host family have cared for children for several days while Dad completed treatment? Could someone have noticed that an isolated parent was struggling and begun showing up consistently?

We will never know the answer in every situation, and prevention will never eliminate every case of abuse or neglect. But the evidence gives us good reason to invest in protective factors: practical support, healthy relationships, parenting knowledge, resilience, and strong communities all contribute to environments where children are more likely to be safe and families are better equipped to weather hardship.

That creates a role for nearly all of us.

We can notice families earlier. We can make it easier to ask for help. We can meet practical needs before they grow. We can become mentors, host families, donors, neighbors, and friends. Churches can become communities where parents experiencing hardship find grace, support, and people willing to walk alongside them.

At Christian , we believe chHeritageanging the future of child welfare means caring well for children when crisis happens, and building stronger families and communities so we can prevent removal whenever safely possible.

And we believe the Church has an extraordinary opportunity to help.

Are you ready to help strengthen a family?