Introduction

Kinship Care and the Foster Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008: A Web-based Toolkit was funded through a cooperative agreement between the Hunter College School of Social Work in New York and the Children’s Bureau to the National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections.

Kinship foster care is defined as the placement of children who are in state custody in the homes of their relatives (by birth, marriage, or adoption) or in the homes of other close family associates, such as godparents or fictive kin. Both in the United States and internationally, use of kinship foster homes for child placement has attracted considerable professional interest, particularly since 1980. In the United States, the relatively high proportion of foster children who are placed with their kin by the state is part of a larger American demographic tableau: Children living in the homes of relatives without state intervention. That pattern is referred as “kinship caregiving.”

Kinship Caregiving is an area, which is huge in scope and an extremely important area of child welfare policy and practice.   In putting together this Toolkit we made a decision early on to limit our scope.  Rather than attempting to address every issue in kinship caregiving this toolkit was developed specifically to address kinship care specifically through the lens of the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008. It is intended as an online tool for programs, states and tribes where promising practices, programs and resources are made available. For this toolkit, we thoroughly reviewed the four provisions in the legislation that address kinship care. Our goal is to provide the field with information on the four components that support kinship care related specifically to this legislation. We tried to provide a broad array of resources from research, state policies, procedures and practice and an organizational self assessment guide.

I am grateful to our colleagues at the Children’s Bureau/ACF/DHHS for their insight into the need for such a toolkit. Taffy Champion, Federal Project Officer for the National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections, has spearheaded this process and provided guidance and direction in making this Toolkit a reality.

I want thank the staff and our consultants at the National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections for their work on this toolkit. I want to recognize especially Joan Morse our Assistant Director at the NRCPFC who coordinated the development of the toolkit and our NRCPFC project consultant, Madelyn Freundlich, who took the lead in the development of this toolkit.

Gerald P. Mallon, DSW
Julia Lathrop Professor of Child Welfare
Executive Director, NRCPFC at the Hunter College School of Social Work


 

     
 
 
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