Company Spotlight: Sleep Train Mattress Stores

Most residents throughout California have heard the Sleep Train commercials about the needs of foster youth. Over the radio or on TV, the ads ask for the community to donate school supplies and clothing items to youth in care, and most importantly, to get involved in the lives of youth. The Chronicle asked Sleep Train where its interest in foster care comes from, and how else they work with the community to make the day of a foster youth much brighter. With the help of Mauri Knowles, spokesman for Sleep Train, we were able to learn more about the company’s initiatives.

Where does Sleep Train work with foster youth?

Sleep Train has partnered with 24 non-profit foster care organizations in California. These organizations are chosen on an annual basis and serve foster families and foster children throughout the state to reach the over 60,000 foster children living in California. For a complete list of the foster organizations that Sleep Train partners with annually and the communities they serve, please visit this link: http://www.sleeptrain.com/foster-kids-partners.aspx

What kinds of programs/initiatives does Sleep Train have for foster youth?

The Sleep Train’s Foster Kids Program hosts six annual drives that collect important material items for foster children – the shoe drive, school supply drive, pajama drive, clothing drive, dollar drive, and during the holiday season, a toy drive.

Sleep Train’s Dollar Drive, which is new, provides funds for activities and events all kids and teens should have the chance to experience, such as going to summer camp, swimming lessons or attending prom. Recognizing that many foster children are removed from their homes with only the clothes on their backs, Sleep Train’s annual drives strive to help these children and their families replenish these items with new items.  Our foster organization partners have relayed the joy from a foster child that receives a new pair of shoes that fit perfectly – often times it is the first time they receive something new of their very own.

Where did Sleep Train’s interest in foster care come from?

The founder, Dale Carlsen, gained hands on experience on the plight of foster children when he was in college conducting a research project. He saw the joy brought to a child when they received a new item – something of their very own, and even as simple as a new pair of shoes.

Since it was founded 27 years ago Sleep Train has supported foster children and at-risk youth by providing them with important material items.  Today, Sleep Train strives to increase awareness and contributions to foster children and their families by capturing the support of the community and providing an easy way for them to give back to this important cause through its six annual donation drives.  Sleep Train’s six annual donation drives make it simple for anyone to help a foster child and their family by making a small donation such as a new pair of shoes, an outfit, backpacks, pajamas, and gifts.  These donations are then distributed to Sleep Train’s foster organization partners who in turn provide them to children and families in need. Sleep Train utilizes PR, social media, advertising, and marketing to communicate the plight of foster children and spotlight their needs while also providing a way for everyone to contribute to making this plight a little easier.

How do organizations and youth get involved with Sleep Train?

Organizations can get involved by hosting their own Sleep Train Foster Kids drive to support the current drive the company is holding. On its website, Sleep Train has provided everything a company or organization needs to host their own drive: http://www.sleeptrain.com/host-drive.aspx.  Items include signage, email copy and social media copy.

Donations can be dropped at any of the company’s 100 stores and for large donations, Sleep Train will arrange a pick-up. Individuals can get involved by purchasing a new item and dropping it at any Sleep Train store or if shopping is not their thing, they can donate online and Sleep Train employees will shop for the current drive on their behalf.

Los Angeles County Supports Uninterrupted Scholars Act

By: Ryann Blackshere

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will send a letter in support of the Uninterrupted Scholars Act to the county’s congressional delegation, which includes the bill’s author, Rep. Karen Bass (D).

The letter, signed by the board members, will be drafted and mailed sometime after September 10, when Congress returns from recess, according to Los Angeles Supervisor Michael Antonovich’s office.. It supports H.R. 5871 and S. 3472, the companion bills in the House and Senate that would give social workers and researchers across the country the ability to see a child’s school records.

“This will help our department as intended to help our social workers have easier access to school records,” said Armand Montiel, public affairs director of the LA County Department of Children and Family Services.

Because many youth in care are moved to multiple living placements, they often change schools. Montiel says social workers often report a delay in helping a child move schools because of the difficulty of accessing their records. The decision to write this letter and hopefully garner increased support for the act will help not only social workers, but the students.

“Any measure that will help us ensure our kids meet their goals is obviously a positive thing,” said Montiel.

Local promotion of the Uninterrupted Scholars Act has also started to spread in Florida, according to Rep. Bass’ office. There, the office of Gov. Rick Scott (R) has been spreading word around the Florida congressional delegation about the act in order to increase support.

“This act is vital to a young person’s education and we believe this is crucial to providing better outcomes for young people in care,” said Tony Bell, communications officer for Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich.

Working to provide better future outcomes for youth in care is part of Antonovich’s Self-Sufficiency Initiative, which was started last year to develop life skills in L.A. County foster youth and help them access transportation and employment.

Ryann Blackshere is a multimedia journalist with Fostering Media Connections.

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Youth Services Insider: 2013, the Dawn of the American Impact Bond?

by John Kelly

A continuing resolution for the first months of fiscal 2013 is all but a certainty, which means federal allocations for juvenile justice (and pretty much all other discretionary youth accounts) are not going to see increases in the near future.

If you’re looking for some optimism in the world of funding, take heart in the fact that 2013 will be the pioneer year for social impact bonds (SIB) in the United States. And the American experiment will begin with juvenile justice.

Social impact bonds, simply put, allow governments to let private dollars do the start-up work on good ideas and reward only success. Investors and philanthropists come up with the funding to initiate a new project, and, if said project achieves stated goals, the government pays them back with interest.

Will the bonds emerge as a breakthrough in human service reform? That remains to be seen. Here’s a rundown of how we arrived at the dawn of the American SIB experiment.

March 2010: An organization in the United Kingdom called Social Finance launches the first social impact bond in collaboration with the British government. The group pulled around $8 million in investment money, mostly from charitable organizations accustomed to giving money away.

The funds are routed to fuel The One Service, which exists for one reason: helping prisoners exiting Britain’s Peterborough Prison prevent a return trip to the criminal justice system. The One contracts with several area social service groups focused on rehabilitation services, therapy, job training, and family and youth services.

The proposition is simple, but not easy. If the re-conviction rate of prisoners is 7.5 percent less than that of a control group established for this project, the British government will pay back the Social Finance investors with interest.

A higher variance in re-conviction rates will yield an even bigger reward for the investors. But if the re-conviction rate is within 7.5 percent of the control group, the British government does not have to pay the investors back.

The project demonstrates well the allure of SIBs to both sides. Major donors, corporations and foundations can take a large philanthropic stake in social services with some hope of seeing returns instead of simply granting the money. Governments can guarantee payment for a venture that is socially productive and potentially cuts the cost of the safety net, with no risk of throwing away taxpayer funds on an ineffective project.

Interim results on the venture won’t come out until 2014, although Tina Rosenberg of the New York Times wrote in June that the anecdotal evidence is cause for optimism.

February, 2011: President Barack Obama introduces his fiscal 2012 budget, which includes $100 million to fund seven social impact bonds for “among other areas, job training, education, juvenile justice and care of children’s disabilities.”

It is the first such mention at the federal level of social impact bonds. Congress did not bite on appropriating funds for the proposal, but the administration recently encouraged states to include SIB concepts in their plans for child welfare waivers.

January  2012: The Massachusetts Executive Office for Administration and Finance (EOAF) issued a request for responses for two SIB projects, one seeking to address chronic homelessness and another to address recidivism among juveniles leaving the state’s Division of Youth Services (DYS) facilities.

Three quarters of the youths that age out of DYS custody are convicted of a crime within five years and 67 percent are incarcerated again, according to EOAF Secretary Jay Gonzalez, figures that likely come from the last state juvenile recidivism study in 2006.

DYS Commissioner Ed Dolan said the agency maintains supervision of all incarcerated juveniles from their release until age 18; some deemed “youthful offenders” are monitored by DYS until 21.

“It’s two to three years after [they leave custody] that they get disconnected, and don’t have reasonable adults in their lives to help them out,” Dolan said.

Financial advisory firm Third Sector Capital Partners will serve as the intermediary in charge of drawing private investment for the venture, and the state recently selected two local nonprofits – Roca and Youth Opportunities Unlimited – to carry out the work.

The entities are still negotiating the benchmarks for repayment and reward, said Ryan Gillette, social impact bond manager for EOAF.

It will most certainly focus on “making sure people are not going back to jail,” Gillette told YSI, so re-conviction and re-incarceration rates will be prominent.  The state also hopes to tie incentives to employment and educational attainment outcomes.

August 2012: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announces that the city would engage in an SIB arrangement with Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs, which would put up $9.6 million to lower the recidivism rates of adolescent males returning to the city from Riker’s Island. Goldman has tapped social services provider MDRC to run point on the project.

Goldman gets its money back if the project reduces recidivism by 10 percent; larger reductions mean up to $2.1 million in profit. It is similar to the Massachusetts project with two noteworthy differences:

-The age of jurisdiction in New York is 15, which means that most 16- and 17-year-old juveniles here have been convicted and incarcerated as adults. Many of the teens on Riker’s Island are housed in the same adolescent unit, but still: it’s a prison, not a juvenile facility.

-Goldman isn’t exposed to losses in the same way Massachusetts investors will be. Bloomberg’s own foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, is providing MDRC with a $7.2 million loan guarantee, which it can use to pay Goldman back if the program fails to yield the desired reductions in recidivism. That means the worst Goldman could really do here is lose $2.4 million.

“Yeah, we don’t anticipate there will be the level of protection there is in New York” for Massachusetts SIB investors, Gillette said.

Harvard professor and social impact bond expert Jeffrey Liebman called the New York arrangement “perhaps the most interesting government contract written anywhere in the world this year.

YSI humbly submits that it would be a lot more interesting if Goldman wasn’t covered on the back end.  Surely, other corporations and foundations will not receive that consideration from governments interested in SIBs, because there are exactly zero leaders of government in the country with Bloomberg’s combination of personal wealth and benevolence.

-John Kelly is the editor of The Chronicle of Social Change

When Parents Surrender Their Rights

by Amabelle Ocampo

She is 15, a mother and in Yolo County’s juvenile dependency court.

The future of her baby daughter is at stake. She is erratic: A burst of energy for one minute, then nervousness, irritability, and an emotional breakdown.

She stands pale as a ghost facing the judge, tired from lack of sleep. The red splotches on her arm could be sunburn, or self-inflicted scratches from a late night of tweaking. Her hair is uncombed, ratted, and cut unevenly like her mood.

But the focus of this hearing is not about this teen mom’s chosen lifestyle.

Methamphetamines were found around her two year-old. Instead of choosing help for her low self-esteem and poor mental health, the teen decided to sign away her rights as a parent. The hearing is about the future of her daughter, a two-year-old removed from her home by Yolo County Child Protective Services (CPS) due to neglect.

The young mother signs the waiver of parental rights to accelerate permanency hearings. Signing means she is refusing services that would normally aid her in becoming an adequate provider for her daughter. This narrows down the potential outcomes for her daughter to adoption, guardianship, or long-term foster care. With the waiver in place, the state stops services to help the teen become a better parent, and pivots to finding her little girl a safe stable and permanent home.

In 2011, 59.1 percent of substantiated cases of children entering foster care for the first time in California were due to general neglect, according to data from the University of California at Berkeley Center for Social Services Research. In Yolo County, this figure of removal due to general neglect is 73.6 percent. Most of the cases are heard in front of Superior Court Judge Steven M. Basha.

Basha asks the parents tough pointed questions, but his manner is not imperious or forceful. He guides the parents to decisions rather than imposing his will.

During the hearing, Basha asks the teen if this is really what she wants to do.

“I have to do it,” the girl says sobbing, her cheeks wet with tears. She glances back at her own mother for support. Her mother, a greying woman, nods her head in agreement for her daughter to give up the child.

The waiver of parental right changes the focus from ‘family reunification’ to an exclusive emphasis on the long-term welfare of the child. And for those parents who cannot take care of their children, waiving their rights can be a loving decision that is in their child’s best interests.

“It’s not very often, less than 1 percent, but the parents waive their rights to reunification services which allows CPS to bypass them,” says Julliana Kier, a social worker who regularly works with the juvenile court cases in Yolo County. “They talk to their attorney and they say that, ‘I don’t want services.’ Typically this happens with teenage kids. More often times, they just stop coming to visits.”

Many of these parents suffer from severe mental health problems or substance abuse addictions, leading caseworkers to recommend removal of the child in courts, according to Cherie Schroeder, who coordinates foster care education for Yolo County.

“These decisions are made in the best interest of the child. You need to get up everyday knowing that your job is to take care of your child,” said Judge Basha, in a brief conversation we had about how he sees the responsibility of the young parents in court.

“The waiver of parental rights can be executed anytime in the juvenile dependency process,” said Christina Beede, a juvenile dependency attorney in Yolo County. “If the parent decides to sign, or abandon the child, the court sets a state adoption and permanency hearing.”

Foster care is intended as a temporary haven and therapeutic service for children who cannot remain safely at home due to child maltreatment or for parents who are unable to provide adequate care. The goal of the foster care system is to reunify children with their families, or find a family to permanently connect them with, if reunification is not an option.

Only 264 of the 56,138 foster children in California are living in foster care in Yolo County according to data from UC Berkeley’s Center for Social Services Research.

In September of 2011, 104,236 foster children in the United States were waiting to be adopted, according to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) Report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. About two-thirds of them (61,361) were involved in cases where their parents’ rights had been terminated by the court.

In California, the Welfare and Institutions Code (WIC) provides the legal basis for juvenile court jurisdiction and authorizes the court to remove children from the care and custody of parents, if such action is necessary to keep the children safe.

“When a parent is unable to parent, the courts have no other choice but to secure arrangements for permanency, such as adoption, guardianship, or long-term foster care,” says Beede.

Judges like Basha are not alone in making these tough decisions. Typically court rooms are filled with adults: Lawyers representing the county, the biological parents and the children, social workers, and a guardian ad litem, sometimes a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) to speak in the best interest of the child.

Basha clarifies the decision for the young parents by guiding them through their tough responsibility. Teen parents are given many chances to resolve their issues with help from five CommuniCare Health Centers in Yolo County providing free and low-cost adult and adolescent care. Woodland’s John H. Jones health clinic sits across the street from the Superior Court.

A study by Rebecca A. Maynard reveals the economic costs and social consequences of teen pregnancy in Kids Having Kids, which concludes that childbearing alone costs U.S. taxpayers nearly $7 billion annually for social services and forgone tax revenues.

Taxpayers potentially could save as much as $15 billion annually if they were successful in both preventing young teen childbearing and addressing many of the other problems that contribute to the poor outcomes observed for teen parents.

The outcome for this 15-year-old mother is obvious: she is not ready or willing to care for her child. The baby is removed from the care of the young mother.

The teen furtively backs away from the podium. She avoids eye contact with everyone in the courtroom. She hangs her head in dismay looking up briefly seeking acceptance from her own mother.

California County Provides Job Opportunities for Foster Youth

By: Ryann Blackshere

Wearing an employee badge is the best part of Carolyn Swain’s job.

Having been in the foster care system since age 12, she has seen the same badge worn by social workers or county administrators for years.  Every time she visited the county administration building, people with badges were able to bypass the suspicion and intrusion of the metal detectors and immediately access the offices. The employee badge wasn’t simply an identification but, to Swain, an ornament of professionalism and status.

Now that she works for Alameda County in Northern California, she gets to walk in the building every day, wearing her badge.

“I’ve always wanted to wear the badge. It’s the respect,” said Swain.

Swain is one of 18 former foster youth working as part of the New Beginnings Summer Fellowship of Alameda County. The fellowship gives youth the opportunity to gain work experience and develop their professional skills, in preparation for life outside of the system.

This year only former foster youth ages 18-24 who were referred by an organization were eligible for the fellowship. Each fellow is paid $12 an hour by the department they assist, and most work an average of four hours a day.

Swain knows the fellowship well, as she has worked on both tracks of the program. In 2010, while living in housing for former foster youth with children, Swain was looking for work as a certified nursing assistant. Someone working with the housing program told her about the Fresh Start Cafés, which allows youth to work part time at three café locations across the county for 16 weeks. Aramark Food Services provides the food for the cafés with drinks provided by Peet’s Coffee. At the end of the program, the youth receive a food handling certificate and a letter of recommendation from the county.

This summer, Swain is taking a break from nursing to work in the County Assessor’s Office as part of the other track of the fellowship. County departments pay to have fellows work with them for eight weeks during the summer.

While most youth either participate in one track or the other, Swain says she has benefitted from having such diverse working experiences.

“Meeting with the [other] fellows every Tuesday has helped me figure out what I want to do,” said Swain. She has decided that because she enjoys the healing of the nursing profession, and the service of working for the community like the county officials, she wants to become a physical therapist.

Every Tuesday the fellows working in the county offices participate in development workshops, which focus on educational pathways, future planning, and enrichment activities such as volunteering. This week the fellows engaged in speed networking, which created the opportunity for each youth to have professional conversations with at least seven officials throughout the county.

New Beginnings Fellows volunteering at a local food bank.

“For former foster youth, there isn’t the same exposure,” said Lauren Baranco, New Beginnings Coordinator.  “You don’t have a family friend who works somewhere with an internship opportunity for you. So we want to be able to help open those doors.”

Baranco, who has been working with the program since its conception in 2010, says the professional tools youth receive during the fellowship can develop the intangible parts of a young person.

“Something like a badge or a business card turns an intern into a professional. And into a leader,” said Baranco.

The fellowship is a partnership with Beyond Emancipation (BE), an organization in Oakland which provides life support for youth transitioning from the foster care system. BE recruited all of this year’s fellows and provided housing and employment counseling.

Some days, fellows move out of the office and into the offices of other influential professionals in the county.  Judge Trina Thompson, Alameda County Juvenile Judge, was visited by the fellows in July.

“It was refreshing to see a lot of young people who are often counted out or labeled because they are in the foster care system,” said Judge Thompson, who grew up having foster parents herself. She said she told the youth never to allow anyone to talk down to them or make them feel unworthy of the high expectations she has for them.

“I really applaud Alameda County for being forward thinking and providing opportunities for kids who are their kids, since they are the parents,” said Thompson.

In only its second year of existence, the fellowship program hasn’t yet tracked how may youth have received permanent employment after working with the county. But Baranco recalls two fellows having received job offers from the county and many others being encouraged by their supervisors to apply for open positions. Tracking the fellows’ professional development post fellowship is part of the review process she and the fellowship team will do after the fellowship ends next week.

“We’re reflecting on this year’s model and seeing how we can improve. Will it still be during the summer? Does it need to be expanded? We’re determining how we can be most effective,” said Baranco.

For Swain, the fellowship has not only affected her but also her five year old son, Jamari.

“I think it will have great impact on him. He’s already at that stage where he’s trying everything and I tell him you can do it,” says Swain.

“He’ll never give up because I never gave up on my education.”

Ryann Blackshere is a Multimedia Journalist with Fostering Media Connections.

Capitol View on Kids: Waiver Proposals Made Public

by John Sciamanna

The Department of Health and Human Services has posted the state applications for waivers of Title IV-E foster care funding at: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/programs_fund/index.htm#child.  Members of the public are invited to review proposals and submit comments on the proposed demonstrations. Comments may be sent electronically to: cwwaivers@acf.hhs.gov.

Eight states have applied for waivers: Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin.  HHS has the authority to award up to ten per year.  All eight states requested a waiver of the Title IV-E eligibility requirements currently tied to the 1996 Aid to Families with Dependent Children standards.

The states would like to spend funds on services not allowed currently due to eligibility restrictions that currently limit federal support to about half of the children in foster care. The proposals generally describe strategies that would use additional services to reduce the foster care population by reducing initial placements, shorten length of stays in care or support families outside of foster care.

Perhaps the boldest state request is Illinois’ proposal to address the zero-to-three population of children in care with a goal to reduce length of stays and to reduce the number of re-entries into foster care once a child has been reunified with his or her family.  Wisconsin is also focusing on strategies to reduce reentries into care.  Under that state’s proposal, it would extend services to children and families that have been reunified.

Currently, federal IV-E funds stop flowing once a child leaves foster care and under the Wisconsin request, post-reunification services would continue for 12 months.

Washington’s proposal includes an expanded role for differential response as part of their child protective services system. Below is a brief description of the proposals:

Arkansas: Will implement evidenced-based screening practices of families, family team meetings, evidenced-based parenting programs and differential response. It will focus attention on better and increased recruitment of foster homes to reduce turnover, create better matches and placements of children in care and improve stronger family attachment, and improve coordination between the foster and birth parents.

Colorado: Implementation of four practices that include the Colorado practice model, permanency by design, differential response, and trauma-informed systems of care. The Colorado practice model involves workforce development including peer-to-peer mentoring, a collaborative management model across systems and there will be coordination between child welfare and mental health to implement systems of care for children in care. The goal will be to reduce the use of congregate and group care.

Illinois: Will focus their attention on the zero-to-three population.  The waiver will focus on children in the Cook County (Chicago) area.  The state indicates that despite its progress in reducing placements and its success in reducing its removal rate, they are third highest in the length of stay in foster care and the third highest in the number of children who enter care between the age of zero through three.  About 25 percent of the youth that age out of care had entered foster care before the age of five. The proposal focuses on intensive concurrent planning, parent training and support and therapeutic interventions where appropriate.  They will test out the model in Cook County with comparisons to other non-waiver groups.

Michigan: Seeks a waiver to extend funding to a collection of services that will target vulnerable families that have come to the attention of the child protective services system.  They will focus efforts to try and prevent abuse and neglect, and structure prevention around secondary and tertiary prevention. Overall, the state’s goal is to prevent abuse and neglect, decrease entry into foster care, increase positive outcomes for families and improve child well being.  Each waiver family will be offered support services for 15 months, and will be focused in Muskegon County in the west, Kalamazoo County in the south and Macomb County in the east.

Pennsylvania: Will address the entire child welfare population but would limit the waiver to five counties in the state: Philadelphia, Allegheny, Dauphin, Lackawamma and Venango. The state hopes to see a 30 percent reduction in congregate placements and reduce the number of re-entries and total number of days spent in care, while measuring and increasing positive outcomes in the areas of physical health, early learning and academic skills.

Utah: Seeking a waiver to increase the use of evidence-based child and family assessment tools, the development and implementation of caseworker training and tools and increased community coordination and the implementation of evidenced-based services. The state will phase in services to the entire state over a five-year period.

Washington:Would expand its Family Assessment Response (FAR) program. FAR is a version of differential response/alternate response. The proposal focuses on those families that come to the attention of the child protective services (CPS) system but would not include those child abuse and neglect cases that involve physical or sexual abuse. The overall goals include the improvement of permanence for children, positive outcomes and the prevention of child abuse and neglect. As part of this effort the state will seek to expand its use of the family preservation model, Homebuilders. As a measure of success the state will examine data on the reduction of referrals or re-referral for abuse and neglect, the number of placements and the number of removals.

Wisconsin: Asking for a waiver that would allow them to continue case management and services for families that have been reunified. The waiver will allow the state to screen those families that are being reunified and are at the greatest risk of failure, and engage them in Parent-child Interaction Therapy or Child-Parent Psychotherapy. The state also proposes to carry out various health screenings and services that will allow them to address such challenges as the overuse of psychotropic medication

UPCOMING CAPITOL HILL BRIEFINGS/EVENTS

• Social Services Block Grant (SSBG) Briefing. Held on Wednesday, September 12, 10:30AM, 202 Senate Visitors Center, U.S. Capitol Washington DC.
• National Foster Care Coalition quarterly meeting will be held on Wednesday, September 19, 12:00 PM, American Bar Association, 9^th Floor Conference Room, 740 15^th St NW, Washington DC.

John Sciamanna is a strategic consultant on child welfare policy and legislation.

Author Launches Online Network To Help Youth Transitioning From Care

Vanessa Diffenbaugh, author of the Language of Flowers, launched an online platform with the help of a team to assist youth transitioning from foster care.

When Victoria Jones aged out of foster care at age 18, she had no job, no money for food and no place to eat Thanksgiving dinner.

Jones, the fictitious main character in the Best-Selling novel The Language of Flowers, represents the approximately 24,000 foster youth across the U.S. who make the difficult transition from foster care to adulthood each year, according to the Administration of Children and Families.

Statistically this difficult and often premature transition results in challenging outcomes for youth, such as homelessness, joblessness and a lack of community resources and support.

To help combat the difficulties youth like Victoria face once they’re on their own, Language of Flowers author Vanessa Diffenbaugh, along with a team of experts, today launched an online community for youth emancipating from the foster care system.

“I’m thrilled and very excited,” said Diffenbaugh.

Diffenbaugh and her colleagues called the initiative the Camellia Network, meaning our destiny is in your hands, after the definition of the camellia flower in the Language of Flowers.  The new online community is a Facebook of resources. Fifty youth from nine states have profiles with their stories along with a wish list of their most essential needs. Individuals, corporations and organizations also have profiles describing both ways they can help and whatever existing resources they have to help one or as many youth in the network as they can.

The idea is if someone like Victoria has access to the network, he or she will be able to log on and find a company offering job training and/or internships; a mother or a foster dad willing to help with rent money; and an entire community of support.

“We’re not just about youth getting wishes granted, but we’re investing in tech and showcasing work that is being done in a location and give all these organizations a place to be found and celebrated,” said Isis Keigwin, Co-founder and CEO of Camellia Network.

All the youth serviced by the network are referred by child welfare organizations to ensure they have experienced the foster care system, and have access to a computer so they can consistently participate online. The network is starting with 50 youth to make sure all the youth can be helped, and won’t be disappointed.

But Diffenbaugh and Keigwin are clear that the Network has been designed with the goal of signing  up as many individuals as possible to provide financial and emotional support for the youth.

“When people raise their hands and say they want to help, the more people that help the more youth we can serve,” said Keigwin. “I want to see the network grow in a sustainable way, so helping as many youth as possible and getting as many people involved as possible.”

Camellia completed a pilot project of the network earlier this year during which 33 youth in seven states received support from organizations and individuals.  The number one need the network found youth had was health care, both medical and dental. With this launch, the network is working on creating partnerships with entities that can provide such services.

Once the youth receive the health care, school supplies and other needs on their list, Diffenbaugh said, “we hope it wont be just you get your stuff and you’re done.” Instead, they want the young to commit to staying with the network long term for increased support, guidance and to foster a culture of love.

“I want to see the community thrive and interactive and engaging, said Keigwin. “I want to see youth stay on and continue to be supported.”

Ryann Blackshere is a multi-media journalist with Fostering Media Connections.

Youth Services Insider: Time for New Numbers on Adoption Disruption

by John Kelly

Youth Services Insider was able to attend a recent roundtable discussion on prevention the disruption of adoptions involving children in foster care. The conversation started on that subject, but grew to include discussion other aspects of adoption policy.

Following are a few thoughts from the discussion, which was led by former foster youth and child welfare researchers.

How big is the problem? Who knows?
Twenty-eight years ago, University of Maryland School of Social Work Dean Richard Barth completed a study in California aimed at projecting how many adoptions of foster children are disrupted. There’s a few ways a disruption occurs, but the majority of times it entails new contact with the child welfare system or a youth running away from home.

“In California, we went to each county and asked them if they could give us a list or some information about what the disruption rates were,” Barth said in an interview the week after the roundtable. “Some counties had spreadsheets ready, and some didn’t have a clue.”

Barth and his colleagues then asked if the agencies could contact the families where disruptions occurred, and ask if they’d agree to an interview with researchers. Ultimately, he said, just over 100 families agreed to discuss their experiences.

Barth’s team found that about 14 percent of adoptions disrupted. Since then, two studies in Illinois, conducted in the 1990s, found similar rates. And while the federal government helped spur a rise in adoptions out of foster care with financial incentives in the Adoption and Safe Families Act in 1997, it has never required states to report on the success of those adoptions.

Illinois is generally considered to be one of the better states at handling adoptions. But even if we assume the national rate is really been steady at 14 percent since the 1980s, that means there are a whole lot more adoptions disrupting than there used to be.

The number of adoptions from foster care exploded during that time period – from 28,000 in 1996 to 50,000 in 2011. So now, it would be 14 percent of a much bigger pie.

Barth called at the roundtable for a new study to get underway this year and to be ready in time to mark the 30th anniversary of his initial venture.

How would he structure this iteration, we asked Barth on the phone a week after the discussion? He said the best approach might be to find between six and ten states that have some capacity to track children post-adoption. Massachusetts and Illinois are pretty much able to do so now, he said.

The trick would be finding a common way to follow an adopted child out of, and then back into, a system. A big challenge to that, said Barth: in most cases, “their names change” when they get adopted.

YSI mentioned that the Chronicle had, in a recent Knight Foundation grant competition about data, pitched the idea of using social security numbers to follow adopted youths. The theory being: only a youth who was adopted and then had a new child welfare case initiated afterward, would have a SSN show up twice.

“Social security numbers are not in all the [state] databases,” said Barth. “If you got adopted, say you’re 17 now and adopted at 3 in 1998, it is very unlikely that your SSN was entered” before the adoption.

Social security numbers are “much more routinely used” now by agencies, he said, but they are loath to divulge them and risk youths falling prey to identity theft.

Medicaid numbers are issued to most youths in the system, he said, so that might be a better or safer way to use data as a trace on adoptions.

Regardless of the trace identification method, Barth points out that this would only reveal the youths who made further contact with child welfare systems after an adoption. It would not include some of the youths who run away from adoptive homes or children who were placed into residential treatment directly by their adoptive parents.

Either would constitute a disruption, he said; following ID numbers would capture neither.

What is being espoused now might not be working
Barth expressed a similar dim view of the knowledge base around what works to keep adoptions from disrupting.

“Casey Family Services did a big study on its post-adoption services” in Maine, Barth said. “They couldn’t come up with any real evidence that the services had an impact.”

Residential placements are an option that adoptive parents will often pursue on their own, said Barth; indeed, he mentioned at the roundtable that he put his own adoptive daughter in a residential care facility after she threatened his wife a number of times.

Years later, he said, he commiserated with other adoptive parents about how foolish a choice it was. The data on “residential care is pretty bleak, there’s almost no evidence it works and some evidence that some kids get worse.”

Actually, the more accurate take is that the net effect of residential care is zero, Barth said in the phone interview: some adopted foster kids do thrive in the setting. So it may be worth examining what factors into successful residential programs: what are the characteristics of youths who thrive there? What type of program components have the greatest benefit?

Barth also said that efforts should be made to establish a standard, national home visitation screen. James Williams, a former foster youth from South Carolina, agreed. He discussed his experience being adopted by unstable parents that would quickly abuse him, landing Williams right back in foster care.

“Whenever youth go into adoptions, there should be more adult visits,” said Williams. “My adoptive parents had a record of domestic violence. It’s insane when you think about how badly systems want to get kids out. They’re willing to put [youth] with anyone.”

Inform Kids
Based on the experiences of the four former foster youths on the panel, systems generally listen to children’s views on adoption. The problem, according to 23-year-old Tawny Spinelli, is that very little is done to shape the view of children about the possibilities of adoption.

“When I was approached about adoption, I was 13,” Spinelli said at the roundtable.  “I had already had seven different placements with seven different families, some relatives some others. If I don’t belong with other families, why would an adoptive family work?”

But nobody helped her think through that quandary, and her initial reaction was to say no. And nobody brought up adoption with her again until her foster parent mentioned the prospect casually when she was already 17.

Connection to birth family: option, not mandate
Marchelle Roberts, one of the foster care alumni who spoke at the roundtable, said  that little effort was made to keep her connected to relatives when she was still in foster care, and then after her adoption was finalized.

“My adoptive family made me who I am today,” Roberts said, “but I want relationships with any fellow siblings or uncles, etcetera, that I can.”

Ashley Lepse, also a former foster youth, said she was forced to visit with her biological mother even though she did not want to and was on a path from foster care to adoption. Lepse said the mandate was what she disliked, and agreed with Roberts that every foster and adoptive youth should be able to find and seek out their biological family members if they choose to do so.

John Kelly is the editor of The Chronicle of Social Change

Bachmann on Being a Foster Mom, the Foster Youth Caucus and Uninterrupted Scholars

The day before Congress went into summer recess on August 3rd, Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) sat down with FMC’s Daniel Heimpel to discuss her experience as a foster mother, the formation of the Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth as well as the Uninterrupted Scholars Act.

The bill, which would ease access to foster kids educational records, had been introduced by Bachmann, and Caucus co-founders Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif), Rep. Tom Marino (R-Penn.) and Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) on March 31st. The Senate followed suit on August 2nd.

- Daniel Heimpel

Juvenile Dependency Courts 101

What it’s like to be a parent involved in the dependency court system.

- by Stephanie Ludwig

Imagine, you need to rush your child to the hospital and you don’t have a car seat. You make a split second decision to hold your child on your lap. On the way to the hospital, another driver runs a red light and hits your car, killing your child.

This was the scenario that landed a Los Angeles father of three in Los Angeles County Juvenile Dependency Court in 2009. The court ruled that the two surviving children could be removed from their father’s care and placed in the foster care system. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, the California State Supreme Court recently upheld this ruling, citing a “breach of ordinary care” that was substantial enough to trigger child welfare intervention.

The reality is, in the blink of an eye, parents can find themselves embroiled in a confusing court system, fighting to keep their children. According to the National Center for Substance Abuse and Child Welfare, 1.81 million juvenile court cases were filed in the United States in 2002 alone.

One of the first steps in entering the dependency court system is a call from the social worker who interviews parents and notifies them of court date. Deborah Levine, a private practice attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area who spent 20 years working for the Contra Costa County public defender’s office, says many parents become overwhelmed early in this process.

“There’s a difference between what the social worker says and what happens,” says Levine. “The judge makes the decision. Social workers can take a very heavy-handed approach and tell people what’s going to happen. I think that’s frightening for parents because they feel powerless, and it’s not in reality what happens.”

Usually, each participant, the county, the child and each parent have their own attorneys. Parents may hire a private attorney or have one appointed to them by the court.

“Basically, my job is to discuss with the parents what their goals are, explain the procedure of the courts and the likelihood of achieving their goals,” says Levine. “If the evidence is insurmountable, the best thing is to determine an alternative for the child and assist parents to get necessary services.”

Levine says that with county budget cuts, she has increasingly encountered lawyers who are not adequately compensated by the county and thus do not have the time to appropriately represent complex cases.

“There’s such a volume, and the judges are looking at huge volumes of people coming through it’s not easy to determine if the attorney isn’t doing the work,” says Levine.

Children are represented by a court appointed attorney. The Children’s Law Center based in Washington D.C. provides free legal services for over 2,000 children per year. Executive Director Judith Sandalow says the first step in her attorney’s process is gathering information.

“We try to talk with the child’s parents and anybody who has been very active in the child’s life and look at school records and medical records so we can learn about all the different things going on in a child’s life including whether they are abused or neglected,” says Sandalow. “Just because the government says there’s been an allegation doesn’t mean it’s true.”

She says that the law leans toward reunifying children with their parents or another adult they are already attached to, but that the child’s physical and emotional safety must be guaranteed.

“For us, we know it’s in a child’s best interest to be safely with a person they are deeply attached to,” she says. “It may be in the best interest of the child to get that parent some services.”

Sandalow adds that going to court may be difficult for children, and attorneys must evaluate the appropriateness of a child’s presence in the courtroom on a case by case basis. She says many children struggle to understand the role of social workers, judges, lawyers and other unfamiliar adults after they are removed from their homes.

“I think understanding the notion that the judge gets to make such an important decision about their life is hard,” she says. “It is really hard as a teen to accept that adults make decisions for you, it’s even harder for it to be adults that haven’t been in your life.”

Attorneys must do their best to balance the child’s preferences and needs, the facts of the case, and their own impressions. They spend time discussing their own cultural and personal biases.

“I don’t think it’s possible not to bring your own personal experience and educated experience to bear,” says Sandalow. “Just like the adversarial court system isn’t perfect, I think we feel that way about being best interest lawyers. As a society we don’t have a better solution. Someone has to advocate in the courtroom.”

Despite the imperfect court system, attorneys and advocates like Sandalow say it’s the best shot many parents, like the Los Angeles father of three, and children have to determine the best interest for children that have experienced abuse.

“There’s a reason why dependency court is in a court, which is due process,” says Sandalow. “We’re making a very big decision which is taking away parental rights. It is not something we should do lightly.”

This is part of a series of stories that will describe the juvenile dependency court system as seen by Chronicle of Social Change reporters.