Category: Foster Care Adoption

Webcast on the Adoption Tax Credit and Affordable Care Act

Last week, the White House hosted a webcast titled, “Helping American Families:  The Adoption Tax Credit and the Affordable Care Act.” Senior members of the Administration and leading advocates discussed the importance of the Adoption Tax Credit, and the key improvements made to the Credit under the Affordable Care Act.   The webcast features two families who are benefitting from the Adoption Tax Credit and who will share their stories about what adoption has meant for their family.  They were joined by leading advocates on the Credit: Bill Blacquiere, Bethany Christian Services; Barbara Collura, RESOLVE; and Chuck Johnson, National Council for Adoption.

During the webcast, Joshua Dubois, Executive Director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, congratulates CCAI’s Angels in Adoption and announced the reception held at the White House in their honor the evening of October 5th.

To view the webcast, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpHxyoHpu8Y or watch below:

Foster youth speak out on Dr. Phil Show tomorrow

Two of CCAI’s 2010 Foster Youth Interns, Sam Martin and Wendy Ruiz will appear along with Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) on the Dr. Phil Show tomorrow, Friday, October 1st.  The show will focus on the need to improve outcomes of older youth in care and those aging out to live on their own without the necessary supports.  Be sure to tune in!  Check your local listings here.

The show’s website gives a preview of tomorrow’s show:

No Child Forgotten

There are hundreds of thousands of children in foster care right now. Many are the silent victims of abuse and neglect, spending their entire childhoods being tossed from house to house, slipping through the cracks in the foster care system. Dr. Phil gives a voice to the children who feel thrown away and unloved. Find out how you can help a child in need! And, Cindy and Mick are well-intended parents of adopted sisters, Danielle, 13, and Marie, 11. They say they struggle to parent their oldest daughter, who lies and is very angry. Dr. Phil gives a powerful demonstration of what it’s like for kids in foster care, and what they deal with even after they are placed in a permanent, loving home. Then, meet Stacy, 19, who entered foster care at 10 and endured years of horrific abuse before aging out of the system at 18. She struggles to find resources to help her in college. Dr. Phil has several amazing surprises for the teen! And, Dr. Phil and Robin are national spokespersons for Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA). Learn how to become a CASA and help change a child’s life!

New data on children in foster care released

Just the other week, the Children’s Bureau released new AFCARS data.  The below chart taken from their website shows the data trends from FY2002- FY2009.


I was looking over the data with my colleague, and being a numbers guy (our finance director to be exact) David and I decided to look a little closer at the numbers.  We noticed two significant trends:

1) Why are so many more children being adopted out of foster care than ever before?

Between 2002-2009, the number of children waiting to be adopted decreased from 134,000 to 115,000.  However, the number of children adopted with public child welfare agency involvement actually increased from 51,000 to 57,000 over the same time period.

This represents a substantial increase in the percentage of children waiting to be adopted who were actually adopted.  In 2002, only 34% of waiting children were adopted but by 2009 that had increased to over 49% of waiting children who were adopted.  The AFCARS data also shows that the percentage of children in care whose parental rights have been terminated and were then adopted increased from 68% to 81% between 2002 and 2009.

The problem is that no real answer exists for this question.  Several factors may be influencing this decrease in the number of waiting children and the spike in adoptions out of foster care:

  • Policies continue to improve to promote more efficient processing of adoptions.  This is in response to efforts to minimize time in care or prevent placement in foster care.
  • Over the past few years, adopting internationally has increasingly become more difficult due to changes in foreign country’s own adoption practices.  According to the State Department, international adoption is down from a high of almost 23,000 in 2004 to under 13,000 in 2009.
  • Campaigns such as National Adoption Day , AdoptUsKids/Ad Council PSAs, Wendy’s Wonderful Kids, and many others to encourage foster care adoption and recruit adoptive parents have increased over the years

2) Why are there so many less children in foster care now?

Between 2002-2009, the number of children in foster care decreased by almost 100,000 from 523,000 to 424,000.  The number of children entering care has decreased by as little as 7% or as much as 17% each year.  This is due in part to increasing programs and funding to assist families and keep children out of the system.

In an Associated Press article examining this topic, Richard Wexler of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform shares, “Now, finally, it’s sinking in that most cases labeled ‘neglect’ — the single largest category of maltreatment — are really poverty, and it makes more sense to try to deal with the poverty than destroy the family.”

Talked out of foster care adoption?

Stephanie Wang-Breal, the filmmaker behind POV’s adoption documentary, Wo Ai Ni (I love you) Mommy that premiered last night on PBS, has taken her new knowledge of adoption and become an advocate for the world’s orphans.  In the weeks leading up to the premier of Wo Ai Ni (I love you) Mommy, Stephanie began posting adoption and foster care trivia on her facebook page to see what the general public’s understanding of these issues really is.  The responses to one of her posts was upsetting, in the least.

Stephanie posted, “FACT: 123,000 children and youth in foster care are available for adoption because parental rights have been terminated; however, only 55,000 children are adopted each year.”

Below are the responses that 2 readers posted:

“We would have been happy to adopt domestically [from foster care], but I got the cold shoulder from everyone I ever contacted about it, and a few in the field even went so far as to talk us out of it. Why? They really need to work out a new system, and soon!!! It’s just not working the way it is now.”

“We were also talked out of it! We were thinking of fostering to adopt and were told that rarely happens. Almost gave up with adoption until we ran into a friend that had adopted from China.”

The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, based on the findings from their 2007 Adoption Attitudes Survey, recommends that “adoption agencies and practitioners need to be informed about the critical nature of responding to initial contact from those interested in adopting and supporting their efforts to drive accountable, results-driven quality customer service, from initial phone call to post-adoption support.”

But why is there such a difference in how prospective adoptive parents (PAPs) are treated in foster care adoption versus international adoption?

The National Child Welfare Resource Center for Adoption published an article last year that argues the difference is simple: customer service.  Public workers lack the customer service that private adoption agencies who provide international adoption services have.  In foster care adoption, the client being served is the child who lacks the power and voice to advocate.  However, in international adoption the client is the PAP, who comes with a determination to adopt a child, ability to advocate and involve other powerful individuals in the process, and the funding to finance the entire process.

This raises the question, what can we do to encourage policy makers to address this problem?  If customer service was improved for foster care adoption, would we see an increase in the number of adoptions out of foster care, and ultimately less of our country’s children waiting in foster care for a family?

2010 Foster Youth Interns Leave Their Mark on Capitol Hill

CCAI is proud to announce the release of the 3rd annual policy recommendations report authored by the 2010 Foster Youth Internship Class.  Nicole, Sam, Jeremy, Serena, LaTasha, Markus, Wendy, Josh, and Victor spent their summer in DC reading reports and analyzing legislation related to 3 major topics in child welfare: Federal Financing, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Chafee Foster Care Independence Act.  This report is their way to forever leave their mark on federal policymakers.

These individuals arrived in DC with passion and a purpose: to improve the foster care system for their 463,000 brothers and sister in care.

Markus spent his summer learning about the Adoption and Safe Families Act.  It was 2 years after he had aged out of the California foster care system before he even learned that there is such as thing as foster care adoption.  He spent 16 years in foster care not knowing that kids were adopted from foster care, or that this could have been an option for him.

Wendy chose to spend her summer studying federal financing of the foster care system.  She entered care after years of watching her widowed father struggle with grief and later alcoholism.  Wendy’s frustration was that had her father known about services available to them, she and her siblings could have avoided being placed in foster care.

As you read through the pages, remember the 9 individuals who made themselves vulnerable in sharing their personal stories.  They have spent a collective 81 years in the foster care system and have many ideas to share about how to improve the system.

How can we address the shortage of adoptive homes for kids in foster care?

CCAI convened a group of adoption experts to present data and trends in foster care and share lessons learned from five successful foster and adoptive parent recruitment models. While not by design, a considerable amount of the briefing examined data and program examples related to placing older youth who more frequently languish in care.  As the highlighted programs are demonstrating, there is no such thing as an unadoptable child, merely unfound families.

Experts from around country flew to DC to share success and lessons learned with federal policymakers and advocates.  Rrecruitment programs that were represented include:

1) Wendy’s Wonderful Kids

2) Wait No More

3) Real Connections (Rhode Island)

4) You Gotta Believe! (New York)

5) Weekend Miracles (DC and Los Angeles)

While each of the programs presented during the briefing were unique, it could not help but be noted that the presenters and the programs they presented on had some of the same lessons learned.  When making future federal funding and policy decisions, federal policymakers should keep in mind the following:

1) Resource Gaps –Every one of the highlighted recruitment programs was in essence filling in a human or financial resource gap in the public system.  In the case of Wendy’s Wonderful Kids the solution was a full time, trained worker, in Wait No More these gaps were filled through a partnership with the faith based community and in Real Connections, the solution lie in providing services the system did not have the staff to provide.  Congress needs to figure out how to either help support the public private partnership model across the board or consider other ways to promote these gaps being filled.

2) Youth Voice – Another key theme throughout was that youth in the system should not only have a voice but a choice in their own long term permanency planning.  As important, they need to be appropriately supported and encouraged when exercising that right. 

3) Data Mining – These successful programs found that much of the information and relationships needed to secure a permanent placement for the child was already somewhere in the children’s case file (i.e information about a teacher/mentor, mention of extended families).  This information was just not being mined for.  Presenters universally agreed that making this tool a part of their programs was a critical part of their ultimate success.

4) Messaging – Presenters agreed that how and what messages were conveyed to prospective adoptive parents is a key factor to success.  In the case of WWK, the fact that recruitment was child centered was key and Wait No More stressed the need to be open and honest about the realities of parenting previously traumatized children.  And all agreed that the central message should be that older kids need a family just as much as younger children and that parenting an older child is just a rewarding.

For a full summary of briefing, click here.