Family Finding and Engagement; Intervention to Promote Lasting Relationships for Transitioning out of Care Foster Youth

Reduced, or even a lack of, connections with family, who could provide the needed support for successful transition into adulthood, have immediate and future effects on foster youths' physical, cognitive, and emotional development. Research supports the notion that a relationship with a caring adult and family member has the potential to increase well-being and improve adult outcomes. As a result, 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 family members of children in foster care. The Family Finding intervention aims to improve the well-being of foster youth by helping them find and engage a connection to an adult whom he/she can rely on for a lifetime, thereby promoting emotional permanence. The “theory of change” underlying Family Finding is summarized as the expectation that identifying and engaging family members and significant adults will increase the probability of physical and legal permanency. The intervention is composed of six stages: discovery, engagement, blended perspective, decision-making, evaluation, and follow-up. The first stage for a Family Finding team is to help youths identify potentially available connections. This is accomplished via a collaborative effort by the youth, the family-planning caseworker, and the Administration for Children's Services caseworker. At this stage, the goal is to identify as many family members and other potential adult connections as possible. At the second and third stages, a Family Finding caseworker seeks to engage the families. At the fourth and fifth stages, the team (including youth and family) explores the youth's connections and a potential permanency plan. At the final stage, there is a permanency plan in place, along with a commitment from both the youth and the family to establish and maintain a long-term relationship. Presenters will discuss the following topics: 1) The key practical elements of the Family Finding intervention; 2) The analysis of its success in engaging families and creating connections; 3) Tools to evaluate permanency outcomes; 4) Tools to assess fidelity of the intervention. Audience will gain knowledge about the Family Finding and Engagement Intervention to a degree that will allow them to utilize some aspects of the intervention in their agencies. Learning Objective #1: Audience will learn about the stages of the intervention; Learning Objective #2: Audience will learn about the evidence collected and analyzed about the intervention; Learning Objective #3: Audience will be actively practicing a part of the intervention in small groups. During a ninety-minute session, presenters will first provide detailed information about the six stages of the interventions, then provide a hands-on workshop on utilizing specific techniques that has been proven to be successful in the intervention evaluation. We will share some dilemmas as well as success stories from work we have done in the past four years, and will take audience questions and lead a discussion about the intervention and permanency outcomes.