What Is Organizational Capacity and What Does it Look Like in Child Welfare?

The Children’s Bureau Child Welfare Capacity Building Collaborative works to build the capacities of state, local, and tribal child welfare systems to successfully undertake practice, organizational, and systemic reforms necessary to implement federal standards and achieve better outcomes for children, youth, and families.

The Collaborative is composed of three Capacity Building Centers: the Center for States, Center for Tribes, and Center for Courts. The Centers’ collective services include product development and information dissemination, training and peer networking, and jurisdiction-specific consultation and coaching.

This brief reviews organizational capacity in the context of organizational development, implementation science, and other fields such as public health. It also examines implications of the literature and describes the organizational capacities used by the Collaborative:

• Resources
• Infrastructure
• Knowledge and skills
• Organizational culture and climate
• Engagement and partnership

This is the first of three briefs about organizational capacity in child welfare. The second brief, How Can Organizational Capacity be Measured?, reviews measures of capacities found in the literature. The third brief, How Do We Build Organizational Capacity in Child Welfare?, explores models for building capacity that have been applied in child welfare organizations.