KARA Signature Video (4 minute)
Public Service Announcement( 30 Second)
In America, the average cost of boarding care in most states for dogs is between $20 & $35/day and not that much more is paid in many states for taking care of foster children.
Almost no states have enough qualified foster homes to care for the children that need a loving family.
This website gives one of the most insightful descriptions of foster care in America that I have come upon.
There’s so much to understand about foster care and adoption and we really should be much more aware, kind and generous to the dedicated families that step up to help heal our nation’s abused and neglected children.
As a long time volunteer CASA guardian ad litem, I know that all children in child protection and foster homes have been traumatized. Healing and caring for them is a big commitment and very trying.
Providing help to families that have stepped up to provide for traumatized children deserve your communities commitment to child and family initiatives that make it possible to heal and help children become productive members of our communities. Anything less hurts the child, the family, the schools & community.
. Many people in the child welfare world would like to see a greater reliance on kin care.
But as Harvard Professor Robert Sampson, who offered the keynote lecture for a recent Brookings event pointed out, it will be very difficult to keep these children at home or even in their communities because the problems likely affect their extended families as well. “If you have a parent who has been arrested, you are twice as likely to have an aunt or an uncle who has been arrested,” he said during his speech. When asked Sampson said about kin placement as a strategy for keeping kids out of the foster system, he said that at least with regard to the neighborhoods he has studied, “it’s not a viable strategy.”
Many of the panelists were excited about the prospect of the recently passed federal Family First legislation to offer more evidence-based preventive service programs to families in crisis. As of now, only 7% of these programs seem to have any effect, according to a presentation by Brookings fellow, Ron Haskins.
All this being said, there is no doubt we could make foster care better. We could do a better job recruiting more stable, middle-class families of all races. We could do a better job supporting the families who do this work (the Brookings Institution’s recently-launched CHAMPS program aspires to find policies that will help with these goals.) And we could do more to move children into permanent adoptive homes more quickly. Children in foster care have had difficult lives—both before entering the system and while they are in it—but there is nothing inevitable about their trajectories.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and a columnist for the New York Post. Her latest book is Be the Parent, Please: Stop Banning Seesaws and Start Banning Snapchat(Templeton Press).
“What we do to our children they will do to society” (Pliny the elder 2400 years ago)
All Adults Are The Protectors of All Children
Foster Care Statistics and Research
Foster Care Costs & REimbursements