Partnership in Practice: How Safe & Together Institute and Ohio Intimate Partner Violence Collaborative Created “Working with Men as Parents”

By the Safe & Together Institute Team

When the Ohio Department of Job & Family Services began asking their child protection workers to engage with domestic violence perpetrators more frequently, they faced a critical challenge: How do you prepare workers to effectively and safely engage one of the most difficult populations in child welfare—domestic violence perpetrators—when most have limited training in working with fathers generally?

This challenge led to an innovative partnership between the Safe & Together Institute and the Ohio Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) Collaborative that resulted in “Working with Men as Parents: Becoming Father-Inclusive to Improve Child Welfare Outcomes in Domestic Violence Cases”—a groundbreaking resource that’s transforming how child welfare systems approach father engagement.

The Partnership Behind the Resource

The Ohio IPV Collaborative represents a unique multi-system partnership bringing together the Ohio Department of Job & Family Services, the Supreme Court of Ohio, the Family and Youth Law Center at Capital University Law School, and the Safe & Together Institute. This collaboration exemplifies what's possible when state agencies, courts, academic institutions, and practice innovators work together toward a common goal.

“Based on our experience all over the world, we’ve identified that social workers need targeted, intensive support to effectively engage perpetrators as parents,” explains David Mandel, founder of the Safe & Together Institute and co-author of the resource. The Ohio partnership provided the perfect opportunity to translate this global learning into practical guidance for a specific state system.

Addressing Real-World Challenges

The collaboration emerged from Ohio’s recognition of a fundamental gap in their system. As documented in their 2016 ODJFS needs assessment, domestic violence perpetrators’ behaviors represent one of the biggest child protection concerns and are strongly correlated with child abuse and neglect. Yet workers were being asked to engage these fathers with “limited resources and supports.”

Heidi Rankin, co-author of the resource, brought over 20 years of experience in sexual and domestic violence work to help the Ohio team understand how this challenge connected to broader issues of father engagement in child welfare systems.

The partnership identified that the problem wasn’t just about domestic violence—it was about the field’s overall approach to working with men as parents. “In many organizations, ‘family assessments’ are really ‘mother and child assessments,’” the resource notes, highlighting how system-level practices inadvertently exclude fathers.

Translating Research into Practice

What makes this resource unique is how it bridges the gap between research and daily practice. The Safe & Together Institute’s global experience with father engagement and perpetrator pattern–based approaches combined with Ohio’s real-world implementation challenges to create guidance that’s both theoretically sound and practically applicable.

The resource doesn’t just tell workers they should engage fathers—it provides specific conversation starters, assessment frameworks, and engagement strategies. For example, the “Ask a Man” approach on pages 7-8 offers concrete questions like:

• What are your earliest memories of what it means to be a father?

• What do you think your children are learning from watching your behavior as you interact with their mother?

These tools emerged from the partnership’s understanding that workers need more than concepts—they need specific skills and language to use in their daily practice.

A Model for System Transformation

The Ohio collaboration demonstrates how partnerships can create resources that address multiple system needs simultaneously. The guide serves as:

• A Training Tool: Providing the foundation for Safe & Together trainings across Ohio’s public children services agencies

• A Practice Guide: Offering immediate, practical strategies workers can implement

• A System Analysis: Helping agencies identify gaps in their current approaches and advocate for needed changes

• A Prevention Framework: Extending beyond crisis response to early intervention strategies

Beyond Ohio: National Impact

While created for Ohio’s specific context, the resource addresses challenges faced by child welfare systems nationwide. The partnership’s work has implications for any jurisdiction grappling with how to engage fathers in domestic violence cases effectively and safely.

The collaboration model itself—bringing together state agencies, courts, academic institutions, and practice innovators—offers a blueprint for other states seeking to improve their domestic violence-informed child welfare practice.

Implementation Through Partnership

The Ohio IPV Collaborative continues to use this resource as a foundation for training and technical assistance across the state. The multi-system partnership ensures that the guidance reaches not just child welfare workers, but also court personnel, legal advocates, and community partners.

This comprehensive approach reflects the Safe & Together Institute’s commitment to creating a global network of domestic abuse–informed child welfare professionals, communities and systems—a vision that requires partnerships like the one with Ohio to become reality.

Moving Forward Together

The “Working with Men as Parents” resource represents more than just a practice guide—it demonstrates what’s possible when organizations with complementary expertise come together to address complex social problems. The Ohio IPV Collaborative and Safe & Together Institute partnership shows how innovation happens not in isolation, but through collaboration.

As more child welfare systems recognize the need for father-inclusive, domestic abuse–informed practice, partnerships like this one provide both the model and the tools needed for transformation. The resource they created together continues to guide workers, supervisors, and systems toward more effective practice with families affected by domestic violence.

For other states and organizations looking to strengthen their approach to father engagement in domestic violence cases, the Ohio partnership demonstrates that the path forward requires both innovation and collaboration—and that the most effective resources emerge when practice wisdom meets system implementation expertise.