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We're excited to announce a new tool designed to inform our external stakeholders about the progress and collaborative efforts surrounding CWS-CARES: the CWS-CARES Progress and Engagement Summary. This monthly summary will provide a clear overview of the joint achievements of our counties, organizations, and the CWS-CARES project. It will highli...

The CWS-CARES Super Users Program aims to facilitate the successful implementation, adoption, and ongoing utilization of CARES V1 within Organizations. It is voluntary for all Organizations. The Supers Users Program is integral in successfully implementing CWS-CARES by providing post Go-Live support and assisting with worker onboarding.  Key Ro...

The CARES V1 Implementation Team is preparing to launch a CWS-CARES Sandbox Environment, an online platform where users can practice using CWS-CARES functionality! The Sandbox is scheduled to launch in Summer 2025. Questions can be directed to your CWS-CARES Implementation Lead and more information will be shared as part of monthly Implementatio...

In May 2025, the CWS-CARES Implementation Team held Process Information Sessions for Intake (Screening and Investigations). These sessions walked organizations through the new Intake processes and terminology they can expect to see in CWS-CARES; they also highlighted the ways CWS-CARES is different from CWS/CMS. Session participants are sharing ...

Prior to CARES V1 Go-Live in October 2026, the CWS-CARES project will pilot the new system with a small number of counties (including Child Welfare and Probation) with the goal of gathering lessons learned for supporting all Organizations during statewide rollout. In April 2025, the CWS-CARES project invited counties to volunteer to volunteer fo...

To support efficient and effective child welfare business practices, the project is working with each county to identify external systems that are duplicative of CARES V1 functionality. For example, CARES V1 will include resource family approval, placement, and family finding - functions currently managed in county systems external to CWS/CMS. B...

Goals and Objectives A critical goal for CWS-CARES is making forms and documents efficient for workers to generate and manage, and to standardize statewide forms in one system. The CWS-CARES project understands that counties have their own custom forms and may have unique document generation requirements; CWS-CARES will support document generat...

In CWS-CARES, the Court Record section will house all court work items, hearings, hearing outcomes, and active and closed cases. CWS-CARES will also facilitate the preparation and automation of documents and reports to ensure timely delivery. ​CARES Version 1 will include the following functionality in the Court Record:  Petitions ​ Petiti...

Thanks to the valuable feedback we received from Extended User Feedback Testing (EUST) 2 participants, the CWS-CARES team is making updates to improve the system experience. Below is a summary of what we heard and how your input is driving changes.  From March 24 to April 18, 2025, the CWS-CARES project held its second round of EUST with 198 ...

CARES SPOCs, Implementation Coordinators, County Leadership, Tribal Leadership, Probation Leadership, State Leadership, and OCM Coordinators:   We are pleased to share the CARES Explorer – June 2025 issue, the newsletter for staying up to date on the CWS-CARES project. This communication is sent directly to our key stakeholders for project ...