Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2012

Grant to help Wake find foster kids’ relatives faster

The money will be used in efforts to find foster children’s relatives.

Last year, a teenage girl who had been in foster care for 15 years met her uncle and aunt for the first time.

The uncle was a teenager when the girl was put into foster care. For 15 years, he thought she had been adopted into another family. He kept a picture of her as a toddler in his family’s Raleigh home. Every time he saw a girl about her age, he wondered if she was his niece.

In reality, the girl’s adoption at age 4 had fallen through. By 17, she had been shuffled between foster homes more than 30 times. But records showed no relatives willing to take her in.

Then, using a new service aimed at connecting foster kids with previously unidentified extended family, Wake County Human Services arranged a reunion. For the girl, finding out she had living family who cared about her was a big deal.

“It was so positive for her to see someone in her family who had done well and was functional,” said Wake County adoption supervisor Jean Hagen-Johnson . “Before we got involved, she had no one.”

Wake County Human Services hopes to facilitate more of those reunions earlier in the foster care process, thanks to a new $180,000 grant from Seattle-based nonprofit Casey Family Programs. The grant was announced at the Wake County Board of Commissioners meeting Jan. 17. The county expects more than 250 children to be reconnected with relatives as a result, board chairman Paul Coble said.

The money will allow the county to expand its use of the Family Finding Services program, a national initiative that tracks down relatives of foster children to help establish permanent homes and support networks. The program will also be used with a smaller group of high-risk families to help prevent or shorten foster care stays.

“We always look to relatives first for placement,” said Warren Ludwig, director for the child welfare division of human services. “This will allow us to be more intensive in finding them.”

Six new workers

A grant from the Duke Endowment in 2008 allowed Wake County to begin using Family Finding Services to locate relatives for older children who had been in foster care for an extended period.

The new grant from Casey Family Programs will allow the county to match funds with the Children’s Home Society of North Carolina to extend the program to children of all ages. Six new workers will be dedicated to locating a child’s extended family through the program as soon as the county takes custody.

The additional workers dedicated solely to tracking down family will make a big difference, Ludwig said.

Right now, 210 social workers handle the 550 children currently in foster care in Wake County, along with assessing new case reports and providing in-home preventative services to about 1,200 families a year. All that means mountains of paperwork. When children are at risk of being taken into foster care, social workers ask parents for names of relatives who could take the child. But parents do not always disclose the names of all relatives, and social workers do not have the time or training for investigative work, Ludwig said.

The prior philosophy was that if family members didn’t come forward, they were not interested in helping the child, and foster care was the best option, Hagen-Johnson said. Research has since shown otherwise, and services such as Family Finding are growing increasingly popular.

Support network

Wake County’s new grant also will help fund family educational support groups, aid relatives with the first-time costs of taking children into their homes, assist with training costs for child welfare staff and pay for contracts for legal services to transfer custody to relatives.

Lindsay Harrison, Family Finding program supervisor for the Children’s Home Society, worked with a similar, highly successful program in San Francisco for almost two years. Reconnecting children with members of their biological family gives them a sense of history and a sense of self, Harrison said, in addition to the continuing support network vital to a stable young adulthood.

“Children’s healthy development is linked to their belonging to a family and the security provided by that unconditional love and acceptance,” Harrison said. “Foster care is a very temporary stop along the way – the best way to raise a child is in a family.”