FAMILY TO FAMILY: Building Bridges for Child Welfare with Families, Neighborhoods, and Communities (1999)

In the field of child welfare, the list of migraines can be a long one. Agency frontline workers are laboring at or past capacity and yet have great difficulty achieving desired outcomes. Caseloads can be enormous and seem only to be growing. Children and youth from communities of color are disproportionately represented in out-of-home placements. Foster and adoptive parents seem more scarce than ever, and children are staying far too long in temporary living situations. The catalogue of problems faced by children at risk is more serious and difficult than at any time in the past 25 years. In states as diverse as Pennsylvania and Maryland and in such urban areas as New York City, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, child welfare agency leaders have developed a response that is addressing these challenges. With the help of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, they have adopted a set of strategies and practices called Family to Family: Tools for Rebuilding Foster Care. It is a systemwide overhaul of child welfare services that combines traditional and tested principles with new practical tools for daily practice. Successes and Challenges Nationwide, the number of children in out-of-home care has skyrocketed to an all-time high. Best estimates are that more than 500,000 infants, children, and youth are under the care of child welfare agencies on any given day. Los Angeles County has about 50,000 in custody; New York City is responsible for nearly 40,000. Cities the size of Cleveland have roughly 6,000 children in care. These figures have doubled since the mid-1980s, with only a handful of communities reporting a decline until the past few years. Driven in part by increases in the number of children at risk of abuse and neglect, the growth also reflects the difficulty child welfare systems experience in responding to higher levels of need. Many children now suffer from behavioral and physical problems linked to parental drug abuse, environmental health degradation and other consequences of poverty, as well as from physical abuse. The AIDS crisis has left HIV-positive infants and young children without parents and in need of special care. The untroubled blue-eyed poster-child orphan who needs only a loving home to develop and prosper is a long-extinct myth, if it ever was a reality. This has meant far greater demands upon foster and adoptive parents. Child welfare workers cite revolving-door turnover rates as many volunteer parents find they have taken in youngsters with more troubles than they know how to handle. A child's multiple needs now require multiple responses and expertise, not only in child care and discipline but also in special education, learning disabilities, health care, psychology, and rehabilitation. Foster parents leaving the system often complain that they received inadequate support from the child welfare agency to meet these multiple needs. The bottom line: the pool of available foster families has been in steady decline across the United States, just as children coming into care have been increasing in numbers. Some agencies worry that they have exhausted their community's available supply of foster and adoptive parents. Or they categorize even 10-year-olds as unadoptable until they age out of the system. Teenagers are routinely placed in group care only. Children removed from their birth families for their own safety often wait a long time for permanent placement; even infants entering care can wait four or more years for permanent families. Large numbers have been placed in shelters, group homes, and institutions, or with relatives who may not have the resources to care for them. When the Family to Family initiative began in 1992, these trends were widely thought to be irreversible, noted John Mattingly of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. But we knew from experience in some public child welfare agencies that children, families, and communities could be linked with child welfare workers and foster and adoptive parents in a strong partnership for the benefit of the children. …