Greetings Permanency Champions,
Permanency Tip of the Week: Permanency on Your Youth’s Best Day
When we think of Permanency, it often centers on who would our Youth turn to when they are in a difficult situation. The sense of loss and isolation might be even more significant when our Youth have their best day and there is no one to celebrate with them. Let’s make sure that when our Youth are in crisis, there is someone to support them and when our Youth succeed, there is someone to celebrate with them!
Permanency Success Story of the Week: Enriching a Family’s Life Through Adoption
AdoptUSKids – “There is a little sizzle of recognition you get when you know it is your kid. We felt it, and our kids felt it too.” To say that Kathryn Reiss always wanted a large family is an understatement. When she was a little girl, Kathryn loved to read books about large families, especially stories of families grown through adoption. She told her mom that when she grew up, she wanted 20 children—10 by birth, and 10 through adoption…
We talked with Kathryn about her 33 years as a parent and how adoption from foster care has enriched her family’s life…You are a big advocate of adopting older children. Why? When children come into a family at older ages, they are making a brave choice to move into the next chapter of their lives. They know that their birth parents tried to parent them but were not able to. They have been through trauma and chaos, and may have lived with several foster families. They come to us at the point when they are no longer expecting their birth families to raise them. Our children understood that we wanted to be part of the solution for them and to enhance all our lives by becoming a family. We all agree it has worked very well indeed!
Permanency Related Articles:
Wendy’s Celebrates Adoption-Friendly Workplaces
The Square Deal – At Wendy’s®, we believe our brand purpose is to create joy and opportunity through food, family, and community. One of the many ways we bring this purpose to life is by supporting the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption® and their signature program, Wendy’s Wonderful Kids®. I’m honored to serve as Vice Chair of the DTFA Board of Trustees and am committed to helping the DTFA find permanent, loving families for the more than 110,000 children waiting in foster care.
For the past 11 years, the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption has surveyed our nation’s employers to find the companies and organizations that offer the best adoption benefits…Our friends at American Express® topped the list this year with adoption benefits that include financial assistance up to $35,000 per adoption and up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave to new moms and dads. American Express ranked 31st on the list in 2016, so the increased support they now offer to adoptive parents is commendable. As our founder Dave Thomas always said, “well done!”
Creating a Kin-First Culture in Child Welfare
WikiHow – Online instruction manual for everything from building a patio to reviewing a journal article. With a new installment on kinship care, child welfare practitioners can get step-by-step guidance on how to ensure more children are placed with relatives when their parents cannot care for them. A new WikiHow post on kinship foster care highlights seven fundamental steps to creating a kin-first culture. Published jointly by Child Focus, Generations United and the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law, the articles includes detailed guidance…”Child welfare systems have been geared towards placing kids with foster parents they don’t know,” says Meha Desai, a consultant to Casey’s Child Welfare Study Group. “This guide offers a closer look at what it really means to be a kin-first organization.”
State and Federal Support of Trauma-Informed Care: Sustaining the Momentum
Center for Health Care Strategies – Policymakers increasingly recognize the impact of trauma and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on lifelong physical, emotional, and social health and are beginning to support efforts for incorporating trauma-informed care (TIC) into the health and social service sectors. Proposed state and federal legislative, regulatory, and contracting policies aimed at reducing trauma and toxic stress and promoting resiliency and trauma-informed practices are burgeoning.
By building on this momentum, federal and state policymakers can further opportunities for encouraging multi-sector implementation of trauma-informed models…1) Identify opportunities for collaboration; 2) Measure the impact and return on investment for TIC; 3) Advance delivery system and payment reform models; 4) Engage families and communities with lived experience of trauma; 5) Invest in upstream prevention
Evaluating Programs in Complex Systems: New Approaches
Annie E. Casey Foundation – Increasingly, human service programs that serve children and families are embedded in complex systems. Creating opportunity for parents and children together means that child-care centers might, for example, be in housing projects whose residences are connected to college programs. Community organizations increasingly provide parenting skills education, workforce development programs and have mental health counselors on site. The goal: program participants experience seamless delivery of multiple services under the umbrella of a single program. But integrating approaches that traditionally have been separate requires a new approach to evaluation as well.
Supporting Families to Prevent Adoption Disruption
Child Welfare Information Gateway – Adoption – A number of complex and interconnected factors can contribute to an adoption disruption or dissolution, including child behavior, adoptive family expectations, or a child welfare agency’s limited resources. Adoption disruption refers to an adoption process that ends after a child is placed in an adoptive home but before the adoption is finalized, while adoption dissolution refers to the severance of the legal relationships between the adoptive parents and adoptive child after the adoption is finalized…
1) Learn about the distinction and prevalence of disruptions and dissolutions in Adoption Disruption and Dissolution from Child Welfare Information Gateway. 2) Search for relevant programs and services in the Intervention and Program Catalog from the Quality Improvement Center for Adoption & Guardianship Support and Preservation; 3) Examine the ways in which child welfare professionals can intervene before and after adoption placements to prevent disruption in Plan, Prepare, and Support to Prevent Disruptions by the National American Council on Adoptable Children.
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Take care and keep up the Permanency work – Our children, youth, young adults, families and communities are depending on it!