Family Recruitment and Retention
Recruiting enough foster and adoptive families to care for children, and supporting resource families so that they don’t leave, is crucial to meeting children’s needs for safety, permanency and well-being. You will discover in many of the resources listed below that effective recruitment and retention practice and policy is often not about spending money – but about treating the families respectfully, involving them in decision-making regarding children in their care, responding promptly to caretaker questions, and training agency staff in good customer service.
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My Life in Foster Care
Twenty years ago, I entered the foster care system and stayed in a group home for ten years because my parents, who were heroin addicts, were unable to care for me. I felt institutionalized, alone, and longed for my own family.
Teen Questions for Prospective Adoptive Families
The following questions were generated during a youth and young adult panel discussion and developed as a tool for workers to ask prospective parents and share with waiting teens.
Unconditional Commitment
We have to stop accepting that teenagers in particular are not worthy of permanency. We have to continue to recruit only unconditionally committed permanent families for every teen in our care who will be discharged to no one.
Five Ways to Support Foster Parents
The Coalition's Executive Director proposes five ways that we can better support New York’s foster parents.
National Center for Child Welfare Excellence; Recruitment and Retention of Resource Families
Informational & Practice Publications, Resources, & Tools from Collaborating Organizations
Building Successful Resource Families
Across the country, child welfare systems suffer from a lack of suitable resource families due to inappropriate recruiting and inadequate support. Resource families play a critical support role in any child welfare system, although many agencies fail to give them the respect, support and attention they deserve.
Drifting Into Adoption
A child can live in a foster home for years and never touch the issues deep down inside, as long as that child can hold on to the belief that some day he or she is going back to their birth family.
Best Practices in Foster and Adoptive Parent Recruitment & Retention Plan
NYS regulations require that agencies have a comprehensive recruitment strategy/plan for establishing a pool of waiting foster and adoptive parents that reflects the racial and ethnic diversity of the children in foster care.
Foster Parent Training in America
Prospective parents choose to foster because they find pleasure in parenting and they want to improve a child’s life. Appropriate training will help retain foster parents and enable them to do a better job for the children in their care.
Maintaining Foster Parents
Most people who want to foster or adopt children don’t begin with the skills essential to care for children who have been neglected and physically and sexually abused. These skills must be developed. And foster and adoptive parents aren’t clients who receive services but rather, resource families who need and deserve a comprehensive array of system supports.
Family to Family Tools for Recruiting and Retaining Foster Parents
This tool is about recruitment, training, and support of foster families. But it can also be applied to kinship and adoptive families, for preparation for one kind of family can and should include planning for the others. This is called combined recruitment.
Why Foster Parents are Leaving?
What Foster Parents Want Their Agencies to Know: “A startling statistic: Almost half of foster parents quit within a year of their first placement. Twenty to 25 percent of foster parents quit each year and another quarter express uncertainty about continuing.” — Casey Foster Family Assessment Training Workbook
“Treat Them Like Gold” – A Best Practice Guide
Why should we treat foster, adoptive, and kinship families like gold? Because without them, life is harder for the families and children we serve, for individual workers, and for our agencies. Without them, we have a much more difficult time keeping siblings together and placing children in their communities. In truth, good foster, adoptive, and kinship families are worth more than gold—they’re priceless.