Greetings Permanency Champions,
Permanency Tip of the Week: Start with Permanency in at Least One Area of Life
When everything feels like it’s going wrong in life, often what we need is just one thing to go in the right direction for us to begin to rekindle our sense of hope. For our Youth seeking Permanency, this can be their experience as well. The first sense of Permanency might be a school they enjoy attending, a team they like to play on, a therapist or social worker they feel connected with or a mentor whom they can rely on. On our journey towards securing lasting Permanency for our Youth, let us focus on securing Permanency in any part of their life to help rekindle their sense of hope.
Permanency Success Story of the Week: A Forever Family for Dawson and Dalton
A powerful story of finding a forever family through the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption – Wendy’s Wonderful Kids program.
Permanency Related Articles:
Infant-Caregiver Attachment Linked to Improved Child Welfare Outcomes
Children’s Bureau Express – A model intervention that promotes infant-caregiver attachment shows promise for improving outcomes for babies and toddlers in the child welfare system, according to a recent article in Child Abuse & Neglect.
The Early Childhood Center of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine developed the Infant Parent Court Project model with New York City’s Bronx Family Court. The model was created to address shortcomings in child welfare cases involving children under age 3, which were primarily a reliance on generic interventions that fail to recognize the importance of relationship-based therapy to the developing child. The model was tested in the Bronx, a New York City borough with high poverty and foster care rates…
Jenny Dang Vinopal Tapped to Lead National Foster Youth Institute
The Chronicle of Social Change – Jenny Dang Vinopal, a child welfare advocate with 20 years of experience working with foster youth, was named today as the new executive director of the National Foster Youth Institute (NFYI). NFYI is a Los Angeles-based national advocacy organization that aims to transform the child welfare system and improve outcomes for foster youth. It was founded by U.S. Congresswoman Karen Bass (D-Calif.).
“I feel like working with foster youth is my life’s work,” Vinopal said in an interview on Friday. “I’m committed and very passionate about helping young people find their purpose, their voice, their opportunities.” Vinopal’s priorities at NFYI will be updating the organization’s strategic plan and strengthening safety nets for foster youth that have been eroding, she said…
National Children’s Advocacy Center in Huntsville, AL Receives $2 Million in DOJ Grants
US Department of Justice – Awarded grants totaling $2.1 million to the National Children’s Advocacy Center for the 2017 fiscal year, announced U.S. Attorney Jay E. Town and NCAC Executive Director Chris Newlin.
The Huntsville Center is receiving the funding through the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s Victims of Child Abuse grant programs. Under the Training and Technical Assistance for Child Abuse Professionals program, the center received $900,000 to develop a training program for state and local professionals who shepherd child abuse victims through the judicial system. It also received a $1.2 million grant under the VOCA Act Regional Children’s Advocacy Centers Program to support the Southern Regional Children’s Advocacy Center, which provides training and technical assistance to state chapters, other children’s advocacy centers, and multidisciplinary teams in 16 states and the District of Columbia.
Social Justice Solutions – Jamie Kreiter, LCSW – When you are stressed, your body goes into what is called a “fight or flight” response to prepare to confront or avoid danger. Even day-to-day events can provoke a stress response, and can cause health problems, suppressed immune system, anxiety and depression. Yet not all stress is bad. When appropriately invoked, stress can help you rise to many challenges. There are a number of steps you can take to incorporate calm and live a less stressed lifestyle. Research shows, for example, that the psychological and physical benefits of exercise can help to decrease depression, reduce anxiety and improve overall mood.
Living in a big city, I have incorporated a number of easy to follow steps to help decrease some common stresses in my life: 1) Skip the snooze; 2) Reclaim your commute; 3) Breathe through it; 4) Stop & smell the roses; 5) Laugh more; 6) Take action…
Help for Foster Kids? Focus on Relationships
Charleston Gazette-Mail – The way to get more foster kids into school and jobs may be to look beyond reading and math tutoring and work harder on their relationship skills, says a new report from the Brookings Institute’s Center on Children and Families. This is no surprise. Kids and adults who come from intact families also need relationship skills to succeed in school and work. The difference is, they are more likely to develop those skills, perhaps unknowingly, at the elbow of parents and grandparents.
The stakes are high in learning how to best help foster kids. About 20,000 of them reach adulthood every year. Only 55 percent report having finished high school by age 19, compared with 87 percent of their peers, the report says. They also lag in employment and are more likely to have children of their own.
In West Virginia and elsewhere, widespread drug addiction and death has pushed even more children into the child welfare system. These kinds of soft skills are routinely overlooked in discussions of policy and funding. No one can cut a ribbon over it or assign an authoritative numerical value to someone’s relationship skill. But that doesn’t mean poor skills aren’t holding young adults back.
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Take care and keep up the Permanency work – Our children, youth, young adults, families and communities are depending on it!