Family Ties
Society has no practical, reliable replacement for a caring family.
The core premise of Family to Family is that the child welfare system’s job is to protect children from danger, meet their basic physical and emotional needs, and attach or re-attach them to caring, safe families.This report details the early crafting, implementation and lessons learned from a Casey initiative that put families and kids first and impacted how this philanthropy’s work gets done. It is part of the Foundation’s ongoing effort to distill and share insights about philanthropic practice from our initiatives.
Child welfare systems across the country tried to do what was best for children, in various ways and with varying degrees of success. But they shared a persistent set of problems: overwhelming caseloads, high staff turnover, abandonment of good practices, and faulty decision making. Family to Family’s framers started with an assumption that the child welfare system was too big to take on all at once. Instead, they began with one piece of the system, foster care. They viewed foster care as an entry point to what would become system-wide reform.