The Child Welfare Information Gateway produced a five-part podcast series throughout 2022 that illustrated ways that states and tribal jurisdictions have supported kinship caregivers. The series includes interviews and group conversations intended to provide beneficial information for child welfare and social work professionals about implementing new services and programs, working across agencies, and improving practice. These podcasts highlight programs in Rhode Island (July 2022), Washington State (September 2022), the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe (September 2022), Nevada (October 2022), and New Mexico (December 2022).

The Child Welfare Information Gateway created a five-part podcast series that illustrated ways that states and tribal jurisdictions have supported kinship caregivers. Part 4 of this series explores the public-private partnership between FosterKinship and the state of Nevada. FosterKinship supports the state by providing both kinship navigator services and foster care licensing services, reducing the number of offices and agencies with which families have to interact to adapt and prepare for becoming a kinship family. FosterKinship also provides programs and services to connect kinship families with services or resources they need to raise healthy children. Topics discussed include:

• Kinship caregivers’ challenge to learn about and access available services and supports,
• The value of combining kinship navigator and foster care licensing services, and
• How reducing the number of points of contact for families helps create stronger, more trusting relationships with the child welfare system.

Both inside and outside the child welfare system, the probability that African American children will live in grandfamilies is more than double that of the overall population, with one in five African American children living in grandfamilies at some point during their childhood. This toolkit is designed to give resources and tips to child welfare agencies, other government agencies, and nonprofit organizations, so they can better serve all African American grandfamilies. It also explores some of the unique strengths and challenges of these grandfamilies, which agencies and organizations need to recognize to provide culturally appropriate supportive services.

A disproportionate number of children in grandfamilies are African American. While African American children comprise 14 percent of all children in the United States, they make up over 25 percent of all children in grandfamilies and 23 percent of all children in foster care. The long history in the United States of enslavement, segregation, economic injustice, and institutional racism contributes to this overrepresentation in the foster care system, and likely also contributes to the larger percentage of African American children in informal grandfamilies. This tip sheet is designed as a quick reference tool for kinship care service providers and advocates, meant to help them design and provide culturally sensitive services to grandfamilies and kinship families who identify as “Black” and “African American.” It also serves as a guide for staff orientation/training to work in this community.

Culturally appropriate services are needed to support Latino families as they navigate kinship care placements, which appeal to the family system fundamental to Latino culture. This toolkit fills a critical gap to help organizations and individuals across the country enhance their understanding and skills to help children and caregivers in grandfamilies thrive. The concrete tools include information on the diversity of Latinos and how to serve them with cultural competence that leverages their many strengths, the benefits and strengths of preserving and restoring cultural identity, as well as practice and policy recommendations for addressing systemic racism and biases that limit existing support to Latino grandfamilies and the children they raise.

Latino children are much more likely than non-Latino white children to live in multigenerational households where three or more generations live, and where the grandparents or other kin may be providing a significant amount of caregiving. Multigenerational caregiving is one of the Latino community’s many cultural strengths. This tip sheet is designed as a quick reference tool for practitioners – including social workers, government and nonprofit workers, and community leaders working with grandfamilies and kinship families who identify as Latino, Latina, or Latinx – to help them provide services in a way that is culturally sensitive and effective. It also serves as a guide for staff orientation/training to work in this community.

Family, friend, and neighbor (FFN) child care is used by millions of families, whether it is a regular, paid arrangement, a grandmother who “just provides a few hours of care each week” for her grandchildren, or a well-known neighbor who “watches the kids on her block after school.” This report is a follow-up to Sustaining Family, Friend, and Neighbor Child Care During and After COVID-19: Survey Findings, which offered guiding principles for policymakers to take into consideration as they designed child care policies to be more effective and equitable for families and providers. The report demonstrates how those guiding principles can be applied using specific examples of state strategies to support and sustain FFN child care and empower FFN providers.

This bulletin for child welfare professionals overviews the foundational elements of the family engagement approach and offers strategies and promising practices for implementing it. While the resource is intended to provide information for frontline caseworkers who directly engage families, it also provides information about family engagement at the system, program, and community levels, as best practices are grounded in these higher levels of the child welfare system.

Strengthening Families is a research-based framework developed by the Center for the Study of Social Policy over the last decade to increase family strengths, enhance child development, and reduce child abuse and neglect. This approach helps child welfare systems, early education, prevention organizations, and other programs work with parents to build five protective factors that, when present, increase the overall well-being of children and families. They are:

• Enhancing parental resilience
• Providing an array of social connections
• Providing parents concrete support in times of need
• Facilitating knowledge of parenting and child development
• Supporting healthy social and emotional development in young children

This set of resources includes a state profile of Strengthening Families efforts in Missouri.

This program snapshot examines how KEEP Fathers Engaged, a South Carolina fatherhood program, adapted to better engage fathers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The snapshot also highlights strategies this program and others used during the pandemic that may help strengthen service delivery going forward. These strategies include emphasizing retention of fathers in programming over recruiting new participants, adjusting program services to meet new needs that arose during the pandemic, and expanding the program’s reach by leveraging opportunities created by virtual service delivery.