Casey Connects: Winter 2007
This issue of Casey Connects focuses on the quest to ensure that each and every young person exits foster care with a lifelong, caring connection. It’s a movement that is gaining momentum across America.
Across the nation, 4% of all kids — more than 2.65 million children — are in kinship care. In this arrangement, relatives raise kids when their parents cannot care for them.
There are three general and sometimes overlapping categories of kinship care. These categories are: 1) private or informal care, where families make arrangements with or without legal recognition of a caregiver’s status; 2) diversion kinship care, where children who have come to the attention of child welfare agencies end up living with a relative or close friend of the family. and 3) licensed or unlicensed kinship care, where kids live with relatives but remain in legal custody of the state.
This issue of Casey Connects focuses on the quest to ensure that each and every young person exits foster care with a lifelong, caring connection. It’s a movement that is gaining momentum across America.
This 18th annual KIDS COUNT Data Book provides national and state-by-state information and statistical trends on the conditions of America’s children and families. New this year is information on child well-being in Puerto Rico. This year’s essay examines the child welfare system and challenges the country to make lifelong connections for children and youth in foster care a national priority. The essay also focuses on the 726,000 children who spend time in foster care each year and what can be done to build and strengthen family relationships.
This issue of Casey Connects summarizes findings from the 2006 KIDS COUNT Data Book and essay. More specifically: It tells what we should do — and what select programs are already doing — to help improve the quality of family, friend and neighbor care across America.
This KIDS COUNT Data Book essay explores a common type of child care known as family, friend and neighbor care. It shares real-world initiatives and expert advice aimed at strengthening this child care option.
This report presents the background on kinship care and the challenges facing kinship caregivers.
Part of the Family to Family Tools for Rebuilding Foster Care series. The research highlighted in this publication identifies successful programs, policies, and strategies that have been helping older children find permanent families; as well as how lessons learned from programs and policy changes can be distilled into action steps.
This manual, created for Casey's Family to Family grantees, shows how team decisionmaking works as a strategy for permanence in family foster care system, and how state agencies can incorporate it into their day to day practice.
This report summarizes the lessons learned by the Casey Foundation in its implemetation of a reformed foster care strategy in which child welfare agencies work with families and communities to ensure child placements close to home.
This report explores purchase-of-service contracting and managed care contracting (including the field’s newest option, network creation) as a means of privatizing child welfare services. It helps state and local agencies — and potential service providers — navigate contracts and the contracting process in this new era of serving America’s children and families.