Family Finding Project: Results from a One Year Program Evaluation

Background and Purpose:

The Fostering Connections to Success & Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 has further expanded the movement toward enhanced family connectedness during out-of-home placement. Child-welfare agencies now have to identify and engage immediate and extended family members of children in foster care. Family Finding is an approach that helps youth who are in care, or at risk of being placed in care, to reconnect with their families. It aims to provide a social and emotional safety net for foster youth who have neither a permanency plan, nor a connection with their biological families or other supportive adults.  This presentation presents results from a one-year evaluation program testing the effectiveness of Family Finding Project to strengthening family connections and permanency. We hypothesized that youth who received Family Finding intervention would have more visiting resources who would engage in service planning to prepare the youth for legal permanency as well as greater number of connections.

Methods:

We implemented a quasi experimental design with 40 foster youth ages 10-21 years old to see whether Family Finding intervention could maximize and enhance family connections and permanency among youth in the foster-care system. A pretest-posttest study of the effects of Family Finding and engagement intervention on foster youth in residential treatment and foster homes in the community was conducted between April 2014 and June 2015. We used the Youth Connections Scale (Jones  & LaLiberte, 2013) to evaluate permanency.  The scale assisted us in measuring the number of meaningful connections or relationships the youth had with supportive adults. (We recorded pre- and post-intervention continuous variables. Additionally, we measured the strength of the relationship (degree of relational permanency) between the youth and adult before and after the intervention.

Results:

This study found that enhancing intensive family search-and-engagement interventions resulted in more visiting resources for youth in out-of-home care. There was an upswing in visiting resources for youth, with potentials to progress toward permanency. In addition, there is a greater likelihood that these youths will have at least one lifelong supportive emotional connection with a consistently caring adult. Intensive Family Finding also resulted in a greater likelihood that a child would achieve permanency through placement with a relative, and a lesser likelihood of aging out of care with no permanency. By the end of the one year evaluation, 60.5% of participants had connected with a discharge resource, 92% of these youth had connected with a visiting resource.

Conclusions and Implications:

Youth who are aging out of care, without permanency, are of great concern in child welfare, given the often-grim outcomes for these young adults. Family Finding was significantly successful in facilitating permanent family placements, and reducing the likelihood of youth aging out of care, without permanent connection. This speaks to the intervention’s effectiveness for certain types of permanency outcomes. In hindsight, it seems that we might have been overly idealistic to expect that strengthening family connections and involvement would necessarily result in more expeditious legal permanency for all youth in the study.