Young People in Care are Placed in Families
Initiative Policy Goal
Ensure that young people in foster care are placed with families in their own neighborhoods and communities, thereby reducing reliance on congregate care.
Issue Definition
Young people tell us they have a hard time learning to live in a healthy, functioning family if they haven't been placed with a family. Some studies show that young people have worse outcomes, are likely to spend more time in care, and are more likely to age out of care without permanence if they are placed in a congregate setting. Family-based placement settings allow for normalized relational experiences as well as the opportunities for positive youth development that science has shown to be imperative to resilient brain development. Placement within the same neighborhood and community also contributes to a young person's social capital, a vital resource for young people in transition.
Neighborhood and community connections enable young people to establish supportive networks with a broad range of people and organizations. Keeping young people in their own communities and schools can help them stay connected to the healthy relationships in their lives, and in many cases can increase placement stability. Recent studies show that placement stability is a key predictor of youth success . In addition, congregate care can cost states three to five times that of family foster care placements . These are powerful incentives for states and jurisdictions to undertake efforts to reduce expensive congregate care through family-based placements in neighborhoods and communities familiar to young people.
Status
Several Jim Casey sites' Youth Leadership Boards have produced advocacy documents that address the needs of youth in and transitioning from foster care. Georgia's EmpowerMEnt statement includes as a priority: "Keep us in the same neighborhood when a placement change must occur. We would like to build and maintain good relationships with our neighbors, teachers and counselors. Give us freedom to connect with people outside of the foster care system without finding them through a ‘program'."
A young man in Michigan's Voice II document states: "Make sure that when we're in care we have a stable placement with a family. Most foster youth do not need to be in residential facilities - if we're going to trust family relationships we need to be in a family." It takes visionary leadership, and sometimes it also takes a precipitating event such as a child fatality, natural disaster, severe budget challenge or lawsuit to harness the public will needed to make system improvements. Where jurisdictions such as Louisiana, Maine, New York City, Tennessee and Virginia have been successful at reducing congregate care they have used a variety of diverse strategies, including:
- Involving youth and their birth families in the decision-making about placements and permanency;
- Increasing use of family finding and other means to meet the federal requirement under the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008, to identify and provide notice to relatives within 30 days of removal of a child;
- Increasing payments to foster parents to come closer to the actual cost of caring for children;
- Recruiting and supporting foster families in the communities from which high numbers of youth are removed;
- Increasing community-based services, especially for young people and families with medical, mental health and other disabilities;
- Training appropriate foster families to provide intensive supervision and therapeutic care to meet an individual youth's complex needs, and providing higher payments for this specialized foster care; and
- Reaching agreement with the Governor and state legislature to allow cost savings from reduction of congregate care to be reinvested in implementation of these strategies.
Related Resources
Rightsizing Congregate Care: A Powerful First Step in Transforming Child Welfare Systems; The Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2009 www.aecf.org
Why Should the Child Welfare Field Focus on Minimizing Placement Change as Part of Permanency Planning for Children? Casey Family Programs, March 2007 www.casey.org
For information on implementation of the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act, www.fosteringconnections.org
For research to improve children's lives; including a state child welfare policy database, www.childtrends.org
Policy For Results promotes better results for kids and families through research-informed policy; developed by the Center for the Study of Social Policy with funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, www.policyforresults.org
Social Capital: Building Quality Networks for Young People in Foster Care (2011). Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Inititative.
The Adolescent Brain: New Research and Its Implications for Young People Transitioning from Foster Care (2011); Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative.
