|
Hunting for Grandma
Family finding’ strategy
connects foster kids with relatives and permanent homes.
By Martha Shirk
Campbell,
Calif.
Like many children in foster care, the one on Kevin
Campbell’s mind this morning has no known relatives. But as Campbell
peers intently at his computer screen, a de facto family tree takes root.
“Right there, in the same home for 22 years, is a
76-year-old grandma,” Campbell
says as he looks at a list of relatives compiled by a people-finding
firm. “And there are at least 25 names here. This child has a
family.”
That’s the payoff in “family finding,” a set of
people-locating strategies with the potential to connect tens of
thousands of foster children with relatives who can give them permanent
homes, or at least a sense of connectedness.
Developed five years ago in Washington
state, family finding, or intensive relative search, is being implemented
in foster care agencies as quickly as Campbell
can train new trainers. In states as varied as Illinois,
North Dakota and California,
the process is changing the practice of social workers who once despaired
of finding the relatives of children in long-term foster care. In some
jurisdictions, the technique is also being used to forestall placements
in foster care.
“It is my dream that the expanded use of family finding will
literally dry up the foster-care system,” Judge Leonard P. Edwards
of the juvenile court in Santa Clara County, Calif., said in a speech at
the U.S. Supreme Court in November 2004.
Family finding has been greeted with enthusiasm in part because of
the federal government’s increasing pressure on states to move
foster children into permanent homes. In addition, evidence has been
building that long-term foster care harms children.
Pat Reynolds-Harris, executive director of the California
Permanency for Youth Project, calls family finding “the kind of
breakthrough that child welfare needs.”
“For years, we bought into the idea that many of these young
people don’t have family,” she says. “But when we search,
we often find many family members, some of whom are very interested in
making the connection with the young person, and maybe even becoming the
caregiver.”
Learning from The Red Cross
Family finding is the brainchild of Campbell, 41, who became vice president
of strategic planning and service innovation at EMQ Children & Family
Services here last July, after eight years with Catholic Community
Services of Western Washington (most recently as director of intensive
resources).
Through most of his career, Campbell
has specialized in foster care’s saddest cases: teenagers with
little prospect of being returned to their parents or adopted. Campbell
calls them “the loneliest people on Earth.”
“They are the kids who are universally described as
‘hard to place,’ ” he says. “All I could do was
find them another foster family. And I knew in my heart that the 38th
foster family wasn’t going to turn out much different from the
37th.”
Having grown up in a large family, Campbell
always knew that another relative would step in if his parents
couldn’t care for him. Where are all the relatives of children
languishing in long-term foster care? he wondered.
Convinced that children need families to thrive, Campbell
obsessed over how to connect children in foster care with long-lost
relatives.
While driving to work in Tacoma,
Wash.,
seven years ago, Campbell
heard a National Public Radio report about the International Red
Cross’ family-tracing techniques, which reunite families separated
by international conflicts and natural catastrophes. “If they could
reunite families separated by wars and natural disasters, why
couldn’t they reunite families separated by the child welfare
system?” he says he asked himself.
Campbell
invited Red Cross officials to describe their techniques to foster care
workers in Tacoma.
Using the resources they described, including the vast genealogical
archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and
commercial Internet-based services, Campbell
then began looking for relatives of some youth in the care of his agency,
which provides social and mental health services to families and
children.
For every child for whom he searched, he found relatives who were
willing to step into the child’s life. Campbell
taught the techniques to some colleagues, who had similar success.
In 2000, Catholic Community Services began a concerted effort to
find safe, stable and permanent families for foster children with serious
behavioral problems and multiple failed placements. Treating each case as
a medical emergency, team members combed files for the names of
relatives. They interviewed children about relatives and even unrelated
adults to whom they felt connected. Then they used commercial
Internet-searching services to find those adults, as well as relatives
whom the children didn’t even know.
Over the next few years, Campbell
says, the team found relatives for all but one of nearly 500 youth for
whom it conducted searches. He says 85 percent of the youth were reunified
with their parents or placed with relatives. The agency’s success
led the Washington
legislature in 2003 to require intensive relative searches for all
children in foster care.
In the first family-finding project outside Washington,
EMQ brought Campbell
to Sacramento
County
in 2002 to train the agency’s social workers to find family
connections for 30 youths in treatment centers and group
homes. Within six months, all 30 had moved to family settings, most
with parents or other relatives, according to a report on the project.
The next year, EMQ applied the strategy in Santa
Clara County,
working with the county Department of Children and Family Services. That
project found “durable family connections” for 24 of 27
youth, according to a report from the county agency. Convinced of the
strategy’s usefulness, the county created a Relative Finding Unit
to identify potential family placements for children in care or entering
care.
The Strategy Spreads
The strategy began attracting national attention in 2003, when Campbell
gave an impassioned presentation at a conference in San
Francisco hosted by the California
Permanency for Youth Project.
“I was really struck by the disaster metaphors he was
using,” recalls Gerald Mallon, executive director of the National
Resource
Center
for Family-Centered Practice and Permanency Planning, based at the Hunter
College School of Social Work in New
York City.
“What an apt way of describing the needs of children in
long-term foster care. Our job is to expose states and tribes to
promising practices that we think might promote permanency, and I decided
I really wanted to support this.”
Mallon arranged for Campbell
to speak at several conferences, hosted a Webcast on family finding and
ran an article about it in his center’s newsletter, which has a
national circulation of 5,000.
Requests for training came in, and Campbell
hit the road as a consultant for Mallon’s center, which is funded
by the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Administration for Children
and Families to provide training and technical assistance to child
welfare agencies. Last year, Campbell
conducted trainings in North
Dakota, Pennsylvania
and Utah.
This year, he says, he has booked training sessions in Washington,
D.C.,
Oklahoma,
Colorado,
Oregon
and all the New England
states.
Campbell and other trainers from EMQ’s Family Partnership
Institute are also training child welfare workers throughout California,
through the California Permanency for Youth Project, which is financed
largely by the Stuart Foundation.
Wherever he goes, Campbell
says, he asks agencies for “their 30 hardest cases, the ones they
worry the most about. At the end of the training, if all we do is help 30
kids, it would be time well spent. But my goal is to empower the agency
to do things differently after I leave.”
Among the results so far:
• During four days of training in Ward County, N.D., last
year, Campbell
“came up with approximately 580 potential family connections for 40
kids,” says Don Snyder, the state’s foster care
administrator. “Everybody was shocked at the possibilities.”
County workers placed several children with relatives, and more
placements are in the works. “We just had two grandfathers in
different states learn they had grandchildren,” Snyder said.
Snyder plans to bring Campbell
back in February to help roll out family finding across the state.
• Stanislaus County,
Calif.,
uses family finding for children coming into foster care and those about
to age out. At the county’s Community Services Agency, a permanency
specialist and an Internet researcher work full-time to find and
cultivate prospective permanent connections for youth. In less than a
year, the agency says, it has found “lifelong connections”
– adoptive parents, legal guardians, or adults committed to
enduring relationships – for almost 250 children.
• From January through June last year, Alameda County,
Calif.’s Children and Family Services Agency used family finding to
move 36 youth from group homes to the homes of relatives or adults with
whom they had strong emotional bonds.
Obstacles
A techie by nature who carries two BlackBerry handheld computers even
while hiking, Campbell
is continuously fine-tuning the strategy. Initially, he combined reports
from multiple commercial services to derive leads. But early last year,
he met with officials of US Search.com, the service he prefers, and
negotiated a more useful product.
Campbell
emerged from the meeting with a special Web portal for child welfare
agencies (www.ussearch.com/familyfinders/.com), a template for a streamlined
report and a reduction in the turn-around time for an inquiry to 20
minutes, from two days.
US Search also halved its fees for child-welfare agencies, to $10
for a basic search, which provides a current address and address history
for a single name, and $25 for a comprehensive search, which also
provides the names of up to 25 possible relatives, friends and neighbors.
US Search also agreed to assign a live search agent to each request from
a child welfare agency.
“Often the people we are looking for may fly below the
radar of many public record sources,” says Clif Venable, one of the
company’s family-finding specialists. “By using an
experienced search agent on each case, and by using multiple
databases, we can get the most out of the available information
sources.”
There are, however, some barriers to institutionalizing family
finding.
Some social workers still look askance at the relatives of foster
children. “There is this notion that ‘the apple doesn’t
fall far from the tree,’ that because a parent had done a bad thing
to the kid, then all the relatives are probably bad, too,” Campbell
said.
In some cases, the suspicions are well-founded. Not every relative is fit
to care for a child or interested in taking on the responsibility.
For that and other reasons, not every search yields a placement.
Six months after a 2004 family-finding pilot project in Illinois,
the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services reported
sustainable family connections for only 12 of 25 targeted youth. Even so,
the department believes the strategy has promise and is planning to
integrate family finding into casework for all older foster youth who
don’t have active family contacts.
Another problem Campbell
often encounters is reluctance among caseworkers to connect children with
their fathers or paternal relatives. “We assume a connection to
mothers, but the father has to prove it,” he says.
There are technological and resource barriers as well. In Monterey
County, Calif.,
social workers aren’t allowed to use the Internet at work, so Campbell
arranged for them to initiate searches through US Search by fax or phone.
Also, social workers with large caseloads don’t have time to
search aggressively for lost relatives. Designating staff to do it
full-time, as Stanislaus and Alameda
counties did, takes money. Alameda
County’s
six-month project cost about $570,000 in county and federal funds for
personnel and overhead.
However, the county believes it will save $6.1 million in county
and federal funds over the next four years. That’s largely because
paying relatives to care for children is much cheaper than placing them
in group homes, according to the county’s final report on the
project.
In jurisdictions with tight resources, Campbell
foresees using trained volunteers, including interns, retired social
workers and Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASAs) to search for
relatives.
Finding a child’s family is one thing. The greater
challenge, Campbell
says, “is what you do when you find them. What do you say to a
grandmother who hasn’t seen her grandson in 14 years?”
The relatives who are found must be thoroughly vetted. Agencies
must provide resources to support the relatives’ involvement with
the child, whether that means flying them in from another state or
providing intensive in-home services to help the child integrate into the
family. In a few states, including California
and Illinois,
relatives who care for foster children are eligible for monthly stipends,
easing the burden of housing, feeding and clothing the child.
Even though finding extended family members requires spending
money, it ultimately saves money, as Alameda
County’s
experience shows. Most importantly, Campbell
believes, children do better when they live with people who love them than
when they live in institutions.
“The challenge is how we reinvest our resources and
transform agencies from providing placements with licensed strangers to
providing families with the supports they need to care for their own
children,” Campbell
says. “The social workers, to a person, tell me, ‘This is the
work I came into social work to do.’ ”
Martha Shirk is a freelance writer and author in Palo Alto, Calif.
Her most recent book is On Their Own: What Happens to Kids When They Age
Out of the Foster Care System.
Resources
Kevin A. Campbell
Vice President of Strategic Planning and Service Innovation
EMQ Children & Family Services
Campbell, Calif.
(408) 364-4056
www.emq.org
Crystal Luffberry
Stanislaus County Community Services Agency
Modesto,
Calif.
(209) 558-2348
Pat Reynolds-Harris
Executive Director
California Permanency for Youth Project
Oakland,
Calif.
(510) 562-8472
www.cpyp.org
Clif Venable, Family Finder Specialist
US Search
Culver City, Calif.
(310) 302-6440
www.ussearch.com/familyfinders/com
|
How Family Finding Helps Kids and Families
While the power of search technology is what initially intrigues
most foster care workers about family finding, it’s the power of
the subsequent family connections that has persuaded many of them that
the strategy should be integrated into standard casework.
Even if the family connections don’t lead to placements,
they can provide youths with an important sense of belonging, or a
place to go for holidays. “Every one of us needs people who we
can be connected to for the rest of our lives – parents, aunts,
uncles, siblings – and family finding has given us a way to get
that for these youth,” says Crystal Luffberry, a manager for the
Community Services Agency in Stanislaus County, California.
Child welfare agencies provided these examples of connections
that family finding forged for youths who had been separated from
relatives during years in foster care:
• A young man who aged out of foster care in Stanislaus County
enlisted in the Army, but worried that he had no adult relatives
to draw strength from during his deployment. “He had zero adult
family members in his life, absolutely no one who would keep in
contact with him,” Luffberry says.
Through an Internet search, an agency worker located an
out-of-state uncle. “The uncle put him in touch with at least
eight other relatives and told us, ‘We will build this network
and keep him connected,’ ” Luffberry says. She regrets
that the search tools weren’t available earlier in the young
man’s life.
• A youth who had been in foster care in Orange County,
Calif., for 10 years tried to kill himself shortly after learning that
he would no longer be able to see his sister, the only family member
with whom he had contact. While the boy was hospitalized, Kevin
Campbell of EMQ Children & Family Services ran a family search and
located a grandmother, a step-grandmother and an aunt. All remembered
him fondly, though none had had contact with him for years.
Within an hour, Campbell says, the
step-grandmother sent the youth an e-mail telling him how much she
loved him and recalling their fun times together. She and the other
relatives began visiting him weekly, as well as calling and e-mailing.
The youth now goes to school regularly, has stopped trying to injure
himself and is responding to therapy for the first time, Campbell says. He says
social workers are arranging for the youth to move to a group home
close to the aunt, with the goal of eventually moving in with her.
• As a 17-year-old neared emancipation from foster care in
Alameda County,
Calif.,
his social workers worried about what would happen to him without
family support. When he was an infant, his parents’ rights were
terminated. He was later removed from an adoptive mother because she
abused him, and over the next 12 years, he lived in seven foster or
group homes.
“I’ve got nobody, nobody who’s kin to
me,” he told a county worker, according to a county report. The
worker learned that his mother had died, but she located his father,
who had been sober and employed for many years. The youth has since met
five older siblings and was making travel plans to meet four younger
siblings.
The county report quotes group home staff as saying the youth
“walks on clouds these days” and that seeing him change
since he learned he has a family is like “watching a miracle
unfold.”
Aside from helping individual youths, Campbell says, these
connections are also important for the family members, many of whom
wondered for years what had happened to the children.
“Every person you talk to in the search, you’re
doing something for,” he says. “You’re letting them
know something about what happened to that child, and in doing that
you’re giving that family the opportunity to heal and develop
trust with the government and honor relationships between family
members.”
– Martha Shirk
|
|
