DCS announces Project Awaken: Historic transformation for child welfare in Indian

 To better serve children and families across the state, the Indiana Department of Child Services (DCS) announced today Awaken, a transformational project aimed at redesigning, restructuring, and realigning the agency.
DCS leadership engaged current and former employees, community partners, foster parents, child welfare advocates, faith leaders, judges, and Hoosier families with the goal of improving policies, procedures, relationships, and organizational structure. 
“All Hoosier children deserve a safe place to lay their head at night, and our most vulnerable kids often need an extra layer of security. Things are not working as well as they should at DCS, but we are going to change that,” said Indiana Governor Mike Braun. “With this entrepreneurial plan, we will remove layers of inefficient middle management and bureaucracy and instead redirect resources to frontline services like foster care and family case workers to keep kids safe.”
It is estimated that the Awaken program will allow DCS to redirect $4-8 million to the front lines of child safety.
In November 2024, Gov-elect Braun’s transition team began evaluating DCS. Instantly, they observed that a high-level organizational restructuring was needed to serve Hoosier children better. Among the transition team’s observations, the department featured an excessive number of geographic regions (18), which resulted in communication challenges, a disconnected workforce, and inefficient decision-making processes due to unnecessary and redundant levels of upper management in the field, finance, and legal divisions.
The realignment will see the state map go from 18 regions down to five regions, balancing staff with populations and caseloads in the new regions. As part of this restructuring, multiple levels of upper management have been eliminated, enabling regional directors and child welfare attorneys to have more immediate access to DCS’s executive leadership team and a closer relationship with family case managers.
“Transformational change is challenging and often uncomfortable; however, it is essential to fulfilling our core mission and ensuring that we are protecting Indiana’s children, especially those suffering from abuse and neglect,” said DCS Director Adam Krupp. “With the support of Governor Braun and Health and Family Services Secretary (Gloria) Sachdev, we’ve spent the past six months preparing for this transformative change by fostering a new organizational culture at DCS and crafting mission, vision and purpose statements to unite our team. Hoosier children deserve nothing less than our very best.”
DCS’s new mission statement represents a historic shift in its foundation and operating standards. Carefully crafted to promote a more proactive, purpose-driven mindset, DCS now exists to “champion Indiana’s future by protecting children and strengthening families with compassion and determination.” 
Importantly, DCS continues to recruit additional family case managers to serve throughout Indiana’s 92 counties, focusing on reducing caseloads per employee, improving morale, and enabling each employee to have opportunities to work more closely with the children and families they serve.
If you or someone you know is interested in becoming a family case manager for DCS, please click here to learn more: https://www.in.gov/dcs/careers/.