Identify And Engage Kin At Every Step

Toolkit featuring promising practices that have been helping child welfare agencies across the country increase their kin placement rates. Every practice comes with the necessary real-world tools, such as sample policy language and forms to help you take away new strategies and resources to adapt for your own system or organization. The ideas and materials in this toolkit were compiled from over 35 child welfare agencies across the country who are part of the Child Welfare Playbook & Resource Family Working Group.

Also see the webinar recording and presentation slides about improving your results in kin-finding and placement.

Paper based on interviews with more than 40 agencies across 10 states which outlines the key challenges and success factors to increasing kinship care placements and summarizes how technology can help practitioners better identify and engage kin and save worker time.

Missouri increased family finding through Extreme Recruitment and 30 Days to Family. Extreme Recruitment is a 12–20-week intensive intervention to identify kin for the hardest to place children by using staff and a private investigator to mine records of the children to identify and locate relatives and kin to be explored for potential placement. Introducing private investigators to the program increased contact with relatives from 23% to 80%. The process involves weekly meetings of the youth’s team and follow-up until the youth achieves permanency. 30 Days to Family in Missouri builds off the success of Extreme Recruitment and focuses on entry into foster care rather than focusing on youth once they are deemed hard to place while in care. This program places equal focus on finding maternal and paternal relatives. The goal is primary placement with kin in addition to locating two-to-three backup kinship placements.

Ohio uses Kinnect to Family, a specialized intense family search and engagement program that is similar to Missouri’s 30 Days to Family program. Kinnect to Family expands on 30 Days to Family by allowing all foster youth, not just those entering care, to be eligible. The program works with families before children are removed so they avoid foster care entry when possible