Casey consultants provide intensive consulting and technical assistance to child welfare agencies to boost outcomes for children and families.
Ensuring that children grow up in families and get the help they need to heal, build lasting family relationships and reach their full potential.
Developing child welfare practices that work
Casey consultants provide intensive consulting and technical assistance to child welfare agencies to boost outcomes for children and families.
We partner with jurisdictions to keep abused or neglected children safe and prevent unnecessary removals from families. We also help make sure children grow up in families, not shelters or group homes.
Living with family is often best when children can't live with their parents. Read about agency, data and policy practices that make it easier for children to live with kin caregivers. Learn what can be done to encourage foster parents in their important role. And see how agencies can help kids in foster care whose parents are incarcerated.
It can be tough to become an adult, especially if you’ve been in foster care. Learn how the Success Beyond 18 campaign helps teens prepare for the challenges of adulthood — and learn the high cost of doing nothing at all.
Supporting innovation
Several new tools allow agencies to measure child well-being. Caseworkers, administrators and IT staff can track and share information using Casebook, a powerful web-based tool developed to modernize agency procedures. What’s the best way to match kids to providers who can help? A tool being tested by the Institute for Child Outcomes is designed to do just that.
Neuroscience and child development research offer powerful insights that can shape how agencies work with children and teens.
Improving opportunities for young people leaving foster care
Each year, more than 23,000 teens age out of foster care, often with no connection to their families. The Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative helps young people in 15 states build family connections and access job, health care, housing and other resources.
What’s the best way to help young people — including those in foster care — become successful adults? We support the Youth Transition Funders Group to develop smarter solutions. Also, we’re co-funding efforts to equip caseworkers and child welfare systems to help teens protect their financial futures and avoid being targets of credit fraud.
Partnering to improve child welfare policies at the local, state and federal levels
Learn what a network of reform-minded child welfare advocates is doing to put children and families first in budget and policy deliberations.
Kids need stability to learn, so Casey is working with partners to ensure school stability for foster youth is priority.
Practice and policy experts work with public systems to improve outcomes for children involved with child welfare systems.
Uniting people, public systems and resources to help young people transition from foster care to adulthood — the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative.
Casey Family Services, a Foundation-sponsored private agency, provided child welfare services in New England and Baltimore. During its 36-year history, the agency developed the Lifelong Families practice model to connect children in foster care to enduring families. The Foundation continues to make available its research, videos, publications and other information related to foster care.
Family to Family was an 18-year, nationwide effort to improve child welfare systems. The initiative sought to expand family and community involvement in child protection. Today, many agencies continue to use and build evidence about the effectiveness of Team Decision Making, an outgrowth of Family to Family.
UPS and Casey spearheaded this program in Baltimore, and it has since spread to cities and communities across the nation. The program links UPS and other large employers with community organizations and human services agencies to help prepare young people for independence as they age out of foster care.
This initiative was the first national effort to address the urgent need to recruit, train and retain human services workers qualified to make decisions that affect disadvantaged kids and families. In 2005, the Cornerstone Consulting Group assumed leadership of the initiative, developing Cornerstones for Kids.
Launched in 1992 and in operation for seven years, this initiative sought to create more effective, family-centered mental health services in four disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. The sites established family centers, intensive case management projects, enhanced school supports and violence prevention.
In Kentucky, a program called Truth Telling Circles uses the arts to highlight racial inequities in the foster care system. Read more about its work.
This final brief of the Family Ties series examines how kinship policies have changed and how the field can sustain this momentum. Read more.
States are partnering with kin to strengthen child welfare systems, but more can be done. Discover state practices and opportunities for improvement.