World Wide Wednesday, January 7, 2015

It’s World Wide Wednesday! Here’s what’s news in the world of foster care and adoption around the web:

•  New Website: Advocates for Families First. This organization provides information, direct technical assistance, one-on-one and group education to developing or existing foster, adoptive or kinship family support, and advocacy organizations. Their mission is to build a unified national movement in support of kinship, foster, and adoptive families who care for children and youth, promote their healing, and help them thrive.
• Trauma Informed Care: New Online Tool. The Georgetown University, National Technical Assistance Center for Children’s Mental Health  and others have recently completed a new free online tool entitled, Trauma Informed Care: Perspectives and Resources. The tool aims to support state and local decision-makers, administrators, providers, parents, and youth and family advocates to become more trauma informed. It includes video interviews, issue briefs, key resources and links that will be updated monthly to keep up with new developments in the field. This FREE tool is now live and available for your use.
• PATHS Program Helps Transition to Adulthood after Foster Care. Nineteen-year-old Brianna Deprey, of Algoma, Wisconsin, is getting help on her way to independence thanks to a new federally funded four-county pilot program. When Deprey was growing up, her grandmother obtained court-ordered kinship custody due to problems with alcohol and substance abuse in her home. Now that she is a young adult, she has yet to find a stable home environment. (Continue reading.)
• Adoptive Parents Need to be Supported to Help Their Child Grieve for the Past. Children in the adoptive system will have suffered separation, loss and trauma. The child’s “journey” through this process is explained first to adopters and then to children, when they reach maturity, through court reports produced by social workers. The creation of a “life story” book with this information in can help the child understand what has happened to them, where they have lived, who has cared for them and the decisions that have happened in their lives. (Continue reading.)

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World Wide Wednesday, December 17, 2014

It’s World Wide Wednesday! Here’s what’s news in the world of foster care and adoption around the web:

• Grand Resources: A Grandparent’s and Other Relative’s Guide to Raising Children with Disabilities. Generations United developed this guide and resource directory to equip caregivers, including those that provide full- and part-time care to relative children, with the national resources they need to help their children thrive, now and in the future. The resource directory serves as a companion piece to the guide and provides a detailed list of the quality services, resources, information, and advocacy tools vital for children with disabilities.
• Foster Parents Can Help Their Students Succeed in School. In order for a child in foster care to succeed in school, his foster parents must be leading the charge and blazing a path as his advocate, fighting for his every chance. In truth, it is likely that the foster student will have no other person fighting for him, as his caseworker’s work load is an overwhelming one, and his teachers may be too busy to reach out with information, or may not have the necessary information about the child that they need in order to meet his needs. Therefore, it is up to the foster parent to be proactive in the child’s life at school. (Continue reading.)
• As foster parents, we must recognize our daily successes. We can all agree that we are much harder on ourselves than anyone else. We strive for perfection in our society, for getting it right the first time every time, and this only causes us to be critical of ourselves. What we often overlook is how much we are getting right and how many times we have succeeded. (Continue reading.)
• Resources on the topic of sexual abuse. For a great new list of Child Sexual Abuse Resources, compiled by NCTSN, please click here.  These resources are available in Spanish and in English.

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World Wide Wednesday – October 22, 2014

It’s World Wide Wednesday! Here’s what’s happening the world of foster care and adoption around the web:

• Resources on grandparents raising grandchildren and kinship care:
  • Grandparents Raising Grandchildren
  • Grandparents Raising Grandchildren factsheet series
  • Kinship Caregivers and the Child Welfare System
  • Through the Eyes of a Child—Grandparents Raising Grandchildren factsheet series (University of Wisconsin extension)
  • Working With Kinship Caregivers

• The Great Back-to-School Kit: 17 simple and effective ways to bring adoption into the classroom.

• The Grief and Loss We Feel When a Foster Child Leaves Our Home: Whether a child is reunified or placed with a relative, when they leave it can be very traumatic on the caregivers and other children in the home. In this episode of The Just in Time Webshow, host Lora Diaz chats with foster and adoptive parent, foster parent advocate, and trainer Dania Guzman about the loss and grief families feel when a child leaves their home.
• This issue of Adoptalk, the quarterly publication of the North American Council on Adoptable Children (NACAC), focuses on how older youth need families as much as younger children. It features waiting youth who are soon to be 18 years of age and encourages the recruitment of permanent families for older youth.  Articles included in this issue highlight Advocates for Family First’s new policy agenda, profiles of the 2014 NACAC award recipients,  the use of the 3-5-7 Model for helping children work through grief, and much more.

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World Wide Wednesday – October 15, 2014

It’s World Wide Wednesday! Here’s what’s happening the world of foster care and adoption around the web:

• National Adoption Month Is Coming Soon: Look forward to promoting and supporting sibling connections for children and youth in foster care by bookmarking the National Adoption Month (NAM) 2014 website. The NAM website offers a variety of audience-specific resources to help professionals partner with children, youth, families, and each other to find permanent homes for the more than 102,000 children and youth in foster care who are waiting for adoption.
• Spotlight on Back to School: The September issue of Children’s Bureau Express (CBX) looks at the barriers to academic success faced by children and youth in foster care and some promising practices for enhancing their educational stability. Research shows that many children and youth in foster care are less likely to graduate from high school and attend college than their peers.
• Skim web sections related to kinship care, kinship/relative adoption, and supporting relative caregivers:
  • Adoption by Family Type: Kinship/Relative Families
  • Assessing and Supporting Relatives/Kinship Caregivers
  • Kinship Care
  • Kinship Adoption
  • Supporting Kinship Caregivers Who Adopt 
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World Wide Wednesday – June 11, 2014

It’s World Wide Wednesday! Here’s what’s happening the world of foster care and adoption around the web:

• Handbooks for Kinship Caregivers: In the event that a child must be separated from his/her parents’ care, it is imperative that family connections are preserved for that child. One way to ensure that this occurs is through placement of children or youth in a home with a kinship caregiver. This new National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections (NRCPFC) webpage lists handbooks that assist kinship caregivers in navigating the child welfare system, provide answers to common questions, and list available resources.

  The NRCPFC also maintains a state-by-state listing of handbooks for adoptive parents, birth parents, children and youth in foster care, and foster parents.

• How Trauma Affects the Brain: Educational Specialist Laura Phipps describes the effect of trauma on the brain, and what this often looks like in terms of children’s behavior. Watch the entire Trauma & Behavior Series:
  Part 1: http://youtu.be/lPftosmseYE
  Part 2: http://youtu.be/zgT6oXkIeCg
  Part 3: http://youtu.be/g7hq9ujeIwM
  Part 4: http://youtu.be/nwabWfky3Ro

• Resources to Help Youth Who Were or Are in Care: Two federal agencies have developed new resources designed to help children and youth who are or were in foster care: (1) The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently released action letters for child welfare caseworkers to send to credit bureaus if they find errors on the credit reports of the children and youth in their care. (2) The Department of Education has a website to help young people who are thinking about attending college. The site includes information and resources on preparing for college, types of financial aid available, eligibility for aid, applying for aid, and managing loans. Although not specific to foster care, it has a lot of information of use to youth considering college. The site includes a specific fact sheet on the Education and Training Vouchers for current and former foster youth.

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