Dr. Greg Manning

As National Foster Care Month Begins, NCAP Sets Priorities, Announces New Members & Strategic Partner & Outreach Initiative

Welcome Aboard Sharon Roszia, Gail Johnson Vaughan and Families NOW!

The National Center on Adoption and Permanency, which recently launched its Senior Research Fellows Program, is proud to share some of the projects/priorities on which we plan to focus in the months to come – with particular attention to achieving permanency for children and youth in foster care (and much more). The following are just descriptive titles; we’ll elaborate as each initiative progresses but, in the meantime, NCAP welcomes inquiries, input, support and discussion about collaboration on these and other efforts:

• Moving Policy and Practice from “Child Placement” to “Family Success”
• The Journey Home: Research to Further Best Practices for LGBTQ Youth in Care
• Evidence-Based Knowledge/Skills Training for Children, Parents in Multiracial Families
• Leveling the Playing Field: Achieving Equality and Fairness for Adopted People
• Taming the Wild, Wild Web: Promoting Best Practices and Safeguards on the Internet
• Education, training, research, presentations, consultation, strategy, communications, media and advocacy for original/adoptive/foster/kinship/guardianship and all families!

With National Foster Care Month beginning today, we are also delighted to announce the addition of two esteemed new members of the NCAP team: Sharon Roszia and Gail Johnson Vaughan, both of whom for decades have been among the most accomplished professionals in the realms of adoption, child welfare and permanency. In addition, we are delighted to welcome Families NOW (which Vaughan founded), as the newest NCAP strategic partner.

We are also launching the “NCAP Outreach Initiative” to broadly introduce (or reintroduce) our mission, people and work nationwide. The bottom-line message is that through our website and our team of three dozen trainers, educators, researchers, speakers, writers/editors, organizational specialists and presenters, NCAP provides a single destination where agencies and government entities at all levels, conference organizers, family and advocacy groups, and professionals can go for expert services, consulting, reliable information, and other assistance to fill their short-term and strategic needs.

NCAP is led by three highly accomplished professionals: President Adam Pertman, Executive Director Carol Biddle and Chief Operating Officer Allison Maxon. Our mission is to reshape permanency-related policy and practice so they progress beyond their primary, traditional goal of ensuring that all children live in safe, permanent, loving homes – with their families of origin when possible, and in new families when necessary – to a new paradigm with a more vital objective: enabling those children and their families to succeed. To learn more, go to our website, www.ncap-us.org, or contact Adam at apertman@ncap-us.org or 617-332-8944.

To further its collaborative model, NCAP has formed strategic partnerships with organizations across the U.S. and abroad. In addition to Families NOW, our strategic partners are: the American Institutes for Research, the Family Equality Council, Foster Parent College, the Treehouse Foundation, CoramBAAF Adoption & Fostering Academy and the Chronicle of Social Change.