OPINION | In Child Welfare, Can Time-Honored Community Tradition Become the New Best Practice?

by Scarlett Aldebot-Green, CEO, Amara

All too often, stories about families and children involved in the foster care system are hard to hear.

Poverty, trauma, addiction, mental-health challenges, and ever-shrinking safety nets create environments where many parents and families struggle. Sometimes these struggles lead to involvement, or near-involvement, with Child Protective Services (CPS) and foster care. Once involved in the child welfare system, kids and families frequently experience even more trauma — trauma that often passes down to the next generation, potentially creating a repetitive cycle that harms us all.

Washington State is at the forefront of revolutionizing child welfare. Using time-honored community practices and reestablishing them as best practice, Washington seeks to disrupt this cycle for as many children as possible by investing in kinship care, the practice of placing kids who cannot stay with their parents with extended family members or close family friends. Family taking care of family has been around forever, especially in BIPOC communities. But kinship families have rarely been acknowledged and supported at the same levels as traditional foster families have been.

Washington is now one of the first states in the country to create a streamlined child-specific foster care license for kinship caregivers, allowing them to be approved to receive a monthly foster care stipend to help cover the needs of the children in their care — just like non-family foster caregivers have received for decades. Since last September, Washington can serve as a model for other states to improve outcomes for kids in foster care by creating their own child-specific foster care license pathways, thanks to the federal Administration for Children and Families (ACF) issuing a new rule allowing all states to offer such licenses.

I have seen the benefits of supporting kinship families here in King and Pierce Counties over the past year as Amara launched our new kinship programs to provide wrap-around support to kinship families. One of these, KinPLUS (Placement, Licensing, and Unconditional Support) is a pilot in King County funded by ACF and run by Amara in collaboration with the State Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) and the University of Washington School of Social Work. Together, we are better serving kinship families in the child welfare system while also increasing equity in the system. Too many kinship families have struggled for far too long with the huge disparity gap that existed between licensed foster caregivers, who received financial and other forms of support, and non-licensed kinship caregivers, who did not.

Recently, a King County parent got an unexpected call from CPS asking if she could take placement of her niece because the teen could not safely stay with her parents. The parent, Olivia (name changed to protect privacy), was single-parenting three young children but did not hesitate to say yes. Understanding the importance of privacy for her niece, Olivia gave up her bedroom so her niece could have her own bedroom. Amara's KinPLUS team helped Olivia get additional resources and financial support to provide for all the children under her care, including helping Olivia obtain a child-specific foster care license. It wasn't long after that when Olivia's nephew also needed to come into foster care. Olvia welcomed him too, and KinPLUS helped Olivia officially add him to her foster license.

Families like these show us that when extended family or close friends are supported to care for kids in foster care, everyone benefits. Families are not split apart, kids get to grow up connected to their roots, they don't lose their cultures, and they don't experience the uncertainty of being placed with foster caregivers they have never met.

But not all families have relatives who can care for kids when parents can't, so the need for traditional foster care continues. And while having two options for children coming into foster care is a step forward, more investment in families at the front end of the child welfare system would benefit far more kids. Investments in our educational, behavioral health, housing, and child care systems would provide multiple pathways to preventative services, such as employment and housing assistance, and simple resource distribution, such as food pantries and diaper banks. (Amara operates a Family Resource Center with a food pantry and diaper bank in Tacoma, in partnership with Eloise's Cooking Pot and the Pierce County Early Childhood Network Diaper Bank.)

When families are not struggling to get basic needs met, they can stabilize and better support their children, reducing the number of children entering foster care in the first place. When families can lean on one another and on their communities and be supported with care and respect, we can reduce reliance on the child welfare system and envision a different future — one where all children and families are supported, respected, and valued.

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Featured image via fizkes/Shutterstock.com.