Permanency Tip of the Week:
When working with children and families involved with Adoption, be sure to address the issues of grief and loss that first created the opportunity for the Adoption to occur – separation from the birth parents. This is important even for those children Adopted at birth as they experienced up to 40 weeks of attachment to their birth parent(s) during the journey of pregnancy and child birth.
Story of the Week:
A Story of Adoption – You Gotta Believe
You Gotta Believe’s mission is to find adoptive parents for young adults, teens and pre-teens before they age out of the foster care system and run the extremely high risk of becoming homeless.
Current Permanency related articles:
FosterMore – New PSA Campaign w/ Disney | ABC- Foster Care Awareness Month
FosterMore – Strives to Create Awareness of 400,000 Youth in the System! In recognition of May’s Foster Care Awareness Month, FosterMore, a coalition of not for profit organizations and foundations working to raise awareness of the youth in America’s foster care system, have teamed up with Disney | ABC Television Group to air PSAs to encourage individuals to support foster youth through mentoring, parenting and other avenues!
The 30 second PSA “I am Amazing” can be viewed here.
Family Reunification Following Foster Care
This publication from the University of Florida IFAS Extension discusses the importance of providing families with support following reunification. It provides information that may be helpful in addressing the needs of children reunified with their parents, as well as suggestions for promoting and maintaining family reunification. (2013)
Ensure Educational Success for Dependent Youth in Congregate Care?
The Legal Center for Foster Care and Education, a collaboration of the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law, Juvenile Law Center, and Education Law Center, has announced their newest Question and Answer factsheet on the educational needs of children in foster care. This factsheet focuses on youth who live in congregate care settings. (2014)
May is National Foster Care Month
Please join the National Foster Parent Association in celebrating National Foster Care Month by honoring the dedicated foster families across the country and celebrating the amazing children/youth who, through no fault of their own, are experiencing foster care services. Children and youth who are placed into foster care are there due to significant abuse and neglect and cannot be safe in their own homes. Foster families step up to provide the love and healing these resilient children/youth need and deserve. Foster families and caseworkers, along with educators, therapists, CASAs, judges and others, work as a team to help families reunite when possible and when not possible, they help each child find permanency as soon as the child is ready. Every child deserves a forever family to rely on as they grow and mature.
Congratulations and thank you to foster parents who, according to one former foster youth, Rhonda Sciortino, provide “big-hearted, radical hospitality” to each child they welcome into their family. Vera Fahlberg, a well-known child development expert and advocate stated: “Every child deserves an irrational advocate.”
Will you step up and consider becoming a member of this very honorable group of people — foster parents? Look around in your home town or community and join in the celebrations. Perhaps next year, the celebration will be for you, too.
Recipes for Success: A book by and for foster care youth and alumni
National Foster Parent Assn – Are you a foster care alumni or do you know one? EMK Press is looking for your recipes, food related stories, words of wisdom and advice for foster care youth for an upcoming book called Recipes for Success.
Michigan launces child welfare data-sharing system to improve outcomes, increase transparency
Michigan’s foster care and adoption system is launching a new information-sharing platform that advocates say will help improve outcomes for children through increased transparency and more accurate data. The Department of Human Services initiated the online system last week in a “soft launch” of the rollout when workers can adjust to it and fix glitches. The system consolidates databases for the state and agencies it works with, and aims to allow real-time sharing of case data — a crucial capability that was not possible in Michigan previously.
Darla Henry – 3-5-7 Model – May Newsletter
| Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can be a conflicted time for our children and youth who have been part of the child welfare system. It’s hard to celebrate one parent while at the same time experiencing feelings of great loss for another. I’ve included two articles below to help us keep a child-centered focus as we approach, with an understanding of parental loyalty, these celebrations of parental love. |
| Children Love Their Parents, Parents Love Their Children – Integral to our work with children and youth is our ability to make the distinction between love and parenting capacity. Most parents do love their children and yet, for a variety of reasons, are not able to adequately parent them.We can say to kids, your “parent” loves you; however, he/she is not a good parent. This useful step in our work with children, in placement settings, is to assure them that they are loved by a parent; however, while their parent may love them, they do not have the capacity to be a parent who takes care of them and who provides for their needs. These assurances allow for the child to hear the message that they are loved; that what was done to them by their parents was not because they were not lovable. |
You Gotta Believe – Nobody Ages Out
Just in time for Foster Care Awareness Month (May!): Nobody Ages Out. Nobody Ages Out (NAO) aims to ensure that every young person in foster care will have a family long before they reach the dreaded age of 21 when they “age out” of care and are, in essence, left without family or any support. In partnership with Seed Impact and the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, we will be attacking the problem on many levels. We have formed a working group and learning community whose highest priority is to eliminate the ‘aging out’ problem altogether by making sure every young person is connected to a lifelong parent long before age 21. Thousands of youth in foster care face their 21st birthday alone – without the family they were promised when they entered care. This is unacceptable. Nobody Ages Out aims to solve this.