Vol. 19, No. 1 • November 2014
NC Permanency Efforts You Should Know About
by Lauren Zingraff and John McMahon
If you're a foster parent or child welfare social worker in North Carolina, you're already committed to ensuring that every child has a safe, loving, permanent family. You have shown that permanence is something close to your heart. For this reason, we know you'll be excited to learn about two strategies our state is using right now to ensure every child has a forever family.
Family Finding
Family Finding is an innovative model developed in the 1990s by youth permanency expert Kevin Campbell. It offers methods social workers use to help children in foster care find and connect with family members. This can include biological family members as well as family of choice. Many children are either estranged from or do not even know the family members located through Family Finding.Family Finding uses an extensive search and discovery process to find and engage family members. Social workers use Internet-based search tools to locate family members unknown to the child welfare system. Strong efforts are made to connect youth with family members, no matter where they live.
Once they're found, family members help create a plan to ensure they remain engaged and can potentially provide lifelong support for the young person. The support offered by family members may include inviting the child to spend the holidays with them or, in some cases, providing a permanent home for the child (CFFYC, 2008). Family Finding's goal is relational (emotional) and legal permanency for the youth.
While not every family member can foster or adopt, many offer support in other ways. This includes weekly phone calls to the child, attending extracurricular activities such as basketball games or choral performances, and sending birthday and holiday cards and gifts.
This type of connection and unconditional relationship with adults can be a protective factor that helps children through the feelings of loneliness that are common in foster care.
We like Family Finding because it often gets results. For example, between July 2011 and June 2013, the Children's Home Society of NC did Family Finding for 300 North Carolina children. When they were first referred to CHS, on average there were eight known relatives for these children. After approximately five months of work, Family Finders had discovered, on average, an additional 41 (forty-one!) relatives for each child.
Even better, for 89% of these children Family Finders identified five or more family members who said they were willing to commit to a lifelong connection. For 79% of these children, one or more relatives committed to helping the child achieve legal permanence (CHS-NC, 2014).
Permanency Innovation Initiative
There's also the Permanency Innovation Initiative. Under this effort, the Children's Home Society of NC, in partnership with the NC Division of Social Services, is providing three kinds of services to improve permanency outcomes for children in foster care:
- Child-Specific Adoption Recruitment Services. Based on the Wendy's Wonderful Kids Model developed by The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, this program works with children to develop and execute adoption recruitment plans tailored to the needs of the individual child. For children ages 9-17 in participating counties.
- Family Finding Services. As described above, this program uses intensive services to discover and engage relatives of children living in foster care to provide relational (emotional) and legal permanence. For children ages 9-17 in participating counties.
- Training. CHS is assessing county DSS agencies' readiness to implement Family Finding and Child-Specific Recruitment and providing training to support the effectiveness of these services.
The Division of Social Services anticipates that approximately 228 children in 89 NC counties will receive services through the Permanency Innovation Initiative between July 1, 2014 and June 30, 2015 (NCDSS, 2014c).
Why is there excitement about this initiative? We have already talked about the promising results produced by Family Finding. When we look at Child-Specific Recruitment we see the same promise.
So far, Children's Home Society's results with Child-Specific Recruitment in North Carolina have been impressive. In our state 70% of the 275 children served through the Wendy's Wonderful Kids Model were matched with an adoptive family. Fifty-two percent achieved a decree of adoption. For those who were adopted, the median length of time it took between referral to Child-Specific Recruitment and decree of adoption was 519 days, or just over a year and a half (CHS-NC, 2014).
To put this in perspective, 60% of the NC children adopted in 2012 had been waiting two years or more to be adopted; 13% waited four or more years (USDHHS, 2014).
Conclusion
"Permanency" is the same no matter who you are. We all want to feel permanently connected to people who love us and who know us. We all want to feel safe and secure and special within those relationships. Foster parents can help children feel a sense of permanency by ensuring they know they are always welcome and should feel "at home" with their foster families.To learn more about Family Finding or the Permanency Innovation Initiative, contact the Children's Home Society of NC's Matt Anderson (336/369-3814; [email protected]) or the NC Division of Social Services' Teresa Strom (919/527-6344; [email protected]).
"From Place to Place" is a documentary that follows three young people as they turn 18 and age out of the foster care system. It reveals the emotional, financial, and physical challenges they face as they transition on their own without supports or resources. This is a firsthand account of what really happens to young people when they age out of care.
I have seen this award-winning film on several occasions, including screenings at the UNC-CH School of Social Work and the NC General Assembly. SaySo alumni have said they relate and can see their own aging-out journeys in the film.
You can access the website with several video clips and resources, as well as order the DVD, at http://fromplacetoplacemovie.com/
Plot Summary
Having recently aged out of foster care, FROM PLACE TO PLACE follows Micah, Mandy, and Raif as they face life with little support beyond their social worker, Matt. Raif falls in and out of love as many times as he jumps trains, Mandy tries to succeed at her education and Micah just can't stay out of jail. Mustering courage into action, Mandy and Raif travel to Capitol Hill to tell their stories and try to change the system that raised them for generations to come.* * * *
To view references cited in this and other articles in this issue, click here.
~ Family and Children's Resource Program, UNC-CH School of Social Work ~
