Changing the Focus
The approach changes the focus of the adoptive process, placing the child’s need for a family above single issues and decision points or events. Using a teaming model, this makes guiding a child to a legal family more effective.
Lifelong Families is an approach enacted by Casey Family Services to help children in foster care find permanent families. It is rooted in the firm conviction that every young person deserves a forever family, and the approach is a process of restoring relationships, rebuilding and creating families.
Lifelong families is designed especially to help older youth in treatment foster care by providing a bridge of healing that helps re-establish relationships and to build new relationships to fill the gaps. Whenever safe and possible, youth are reunited with their birth parents. Whenever this is not possible, Lifelong Families plays a role in helping young people develop lasting connections to adoptive families.
Lifelong Families shows positive results. More young people are exiting Casey foster care to lifelong families and kids are spending less time in care. Before the Lifelong Families approach, children in Casey foster care spent a median of 5.6 years in care. After using the Lifelong Families approach, that number dropped to 1.0 years.