(Posted 2021 December)
Staff in Fairfax County Foster Care and Adoption’s Permanency and Life Skills Unit recently piloted a new initiative to connect children in foster care with safe and appropriate relatives within 30 days of entering foster care.
Staff from across DFS worked together for months to decide the criteria, process, and evaluation for this initiative and launched the Family Engagement Model. Permanency coordinators, Ann Kim and Natalie Sposato, took on the challenge of tracking down as many family members as they could for three children in a 30-day period.
Kim and Sposato used a variety of approaches to locate family members quickly including:
Searching through agency-approved databases such as Accurint and Ancestry.com to locate relatives. - Speaking with parents, relatives, or caregivers to create genograms, a detailed pictorial display of a person's family relationships and medical history.
- Talking with Child Protective Services staff.
- Engaging with known relatives and fictive kin (close family friends) earlier.
Sposato explained, “It was very invigorating to experience contacting many relatives at the initial separation who may or may not have been aware of the family’s story or intersection with the department. This was made easier if paternity was established at the beginning and there wasn’t any question about being able to contact paternal relatives. Family engagement was also made easier with Fatherhood Engagement partnering with us much earlier in the case. Many families want to be involved but aren’t always sure in what ways they can be.”
Left to Right: Permanency Coordinators Ann Kim and Natalie Sposato
This pilot revealed some challenges that will need to be overcome before the Family Engagement Model could be implemented on a larger scale. Nevertheless, staff was excited to see the possibility it holds for the future of engaging family members earlier when a child enters foster care. There are many reasons for this shift including research that shows the sooner children are placed with relatives, better outcomes are expected including:
- Less trauma when children remain with family.
- Greater likelihood of achieving permanency faster for children placed with relatives at the beginning.
- Decreased time in care.
- Increased placement stability.
- Decreased chance of reentry into foster care.
- Reduced negative behaviors (decreased substance use, less likely to run away).
- Increased school stability and more positive indicators of academic wellbeing.
- Increased likelihood siblings stay together.
- Early family finding and engagement shows stronger likelihood of children achieving care by relatives.
This article posting is part of the Foster Family News monthly newsletter designed to keep foster parents informed about all the new and notable happenings in Fairfax County.
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