How Casey Promotes Permanence for Kids in Child Welfare
Posted February 6, 2012
By the Annie E. Casey Foundation
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We want the best for children in child welfare. That’s why we have led or joined in major reform efforts focused on permanence. Our work has:
- Used intensive consulting to help child welfare agencies improve their permanency rates.
- Emphasized that, whenever possible, kids need legal permanence in addition to relational permanence.
- Asked important questions about how best to involve more family members in parenting kids.
- Used innovative strategies to involve families in their children’s lives, including Team Decision Making, Permanency Teaming, Family Search and Engagement and Icebreakers.
- Improved foster care practice so more children are able to remain safely in their homes, live with family or live in foster homes in their home communities.
- Sparked conversations about children’s developmental need for attachments and explained the important implications of neuroscience for teens leaving foster care.
- Helped child welfare agencies place more children in family homes, not group care, since maintaining and building family attachments aids in achieving permanence.
- Promoted policies that increase permanence.
- Developed permanency focused practice tools, including a supervisory practice model and child-and-family approaches to discussing permanence that focus on what families can offer, not what they cannot.