Permanency Tip of the Week: When Will They Start Loving Me Back?
Once Youth start acting like they want to be in a family, often the family starts to struggle with the Youth not reciprocating the depth of the love they are providing them. This challenge may come to a crisis point when the family is seeking to finalize an Adoption or secure Legal Guardianship. These sorts of challenges need to be anticipated, openly addressed and normalized given that our Youth often struggle with their history of loss, neglect and trauma. Slowing the pace of the legal process paired with showing compassion and providing support for everyone involved can go along with to ensuring a positive outcome.
(Employment) Permanency Success Story of the Week: An Inspiring Success Story: A Chat with an Unforgettable Starbucks Barista
Doing Good Works – There are some people who light up a room and make you smile. Xia does just that. When you talk with her, whether for a few brief moments or during our thirty-minute visit backstage at Disneyland, you can sense her outgoing personality and positive outlook on life. Xia is bright, kind, and friendly…
Doing Good Works got the pleasure of meeting Xia when she was seeking employment and getting counsel from Trinity Wallace-Ellis, Coordinator of the Guardian Scholars Program at Rancho Santiago Canyon College. After Trinity connected her with our team member Amy, Xia was able to apply for job opportunities withSodexoMagic at Disneyland. She was quickly hired, and we were elated that Doing Good Works was able to play a part in connecting Xia with this job opportunity…
We want to wish her continued success as a Barista and in her educational endeavors. Xia is a true inspiration to our team, and Doing Good Works strives to make successful job placements such as this with all the young adults we serve.
Permanency Related Articles:
‘FosterTech’ Magazine Explores Intersection of Foster Care and Technology
PRLog – Today Fostering Media Connections (FMC), a nonprofit news organization released a special print magazine entitled FosterTech, which describes a some of the most exciting and vexing applications of technology in child welfare. The magazine aims to create a base of knowledge for technologists, child welfare administrators, advocates, foster youth and social workers and to engage them in outlining technology’s role in the field of child welfare.
America’s Opioid Crisis: How Children Are Casualties
Huffington Post – Dr John DeGarmo – The opioid epidemic in the United States claimed more than 33,000 deaths in 2015, as public health officials call it the worst drug crisis in the nation’s history. Indeed, the deaths from heroin alone have surged and have claimed more lives in 2015 than homicides by guns. These drugs, these opiods, that are used to often block out pain. Whether illegal, such as heroin, or prescribed by doctors yet are also finding their way on to the black market, such as Vicodin and OxyContin, the rise in opioid use in America is both dramatic and disturbing. Yet, perhaps more disturbing is the number of children being affected by the increase of opioid use in all 50 states.
Chronicle of Social Change – A new report from the National Council for Adoption highlights American adoption trends, including for infant adoptions, inter-country adoptions and adoptions from foster care… The report found that the overall number of adoptions has declined since 2007, the last year the number of American adoptions were counted by the NCFA. Most of this decline is attributed to a 75% decrease in the number of international adoptions, falling to a low of 5,647 in 2015. During that time, the number of domestic infant adoptions remained mostly steady, growing slightly from 18,078 in 2007 to 18,329 in 2014. Approximately 50,000 children were adopted from foster care in 2014, holding steady since 2007. This follows a decade where the number of adoptions from foster care doubled after the passage by Congress of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. The number of children waiting to be adopted from foster care continues to grow.
How Can States Improve Health Care for Pregnant & Parenting Foster Youth?
The Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP) has released a report that highlights opportunities within Medicaid to improve health care services for child welfare involved expectant and parenting youth and their children, making three major recommendations. 1) CSSP recommends adopting policies and practices that recognize and seek to meet the unique, holistic needs of both young parents and their children. 2) The second recommendation is increasing access to health care services and insurance through improving enrollment, eligibility and portability process and policies.3) The third recommendation is improving cross-systems collaboration, namely requiring data sharing across systems.
24 Mobile Apps for the Child Welfare Workforce
National Child Welfare Work Institute (NCWWI)
Stabilizing Children’s Lives: Insights for Research and Action
Urban Institute – To thrive, children need strong relationships with loving adults, a stable environment, and consistent access to food, housing, education, and health care. These basics give children the foundation they need to explore, learn, and grow.
But too many children do not have this stable foundation, and instability in one or more of these areas threatens their well-being. While brief instability in a child’s life is expected and can build resilience, instability can harm a child’s development if its negative impacts are not buffered.
Over the past year, researchers at the Urban Institute, with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, have examined what research is needed to inform efforts to stabilize children’s lives. Here’s some of what we learned: 1) Instability is widespread; 2) Stability depends on a complex web of supports; 3) Despite what we know, we have a lot to learn; 4) Instability may be an issue that can bring people together to support families.