Resource Family Recruitment and Retention

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Recruitment Retention of Resource
Families Lorrie Lutz
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Recruitment AND RETENTION of Resource Families

• Lorrie L. Lutz, MPP Consultant

This learning was supported by the National
Resource Center for Foster Care and Permanency
Planning And the Casey National Center for
Resource Family Support
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Presentation Overview

• Characteristics of Successful Resource Families
• Attending to the Details in Your Shop
• Recruitment Nuances
• State
• Community/Neighborhood
• Child Specific
• Performance-Based Partnerships with Private
  Community-Based Agencies
• Policy Development making lasting systemic
  changes

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They Are Recruiting Smart!
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Characteristics of Effective Resource Families

• From the research that has been completed over
  the past 5-10 years as part of understanding the
  evolving best practices of Concurrent Planning,
  Dual Licensure and more recently Recruitment and
  Retentionwe have learned something about what is
  required of successful foster/resource families.
  

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These Characteristics Include

• Resource Families See Themselves as a Support to
  the Birth Family.
• Resource Families Support and Encourage Frequent
  and Consistent Visitation Between the Child and
  his/her Birth Family.
• Resource Families are willing to live in the
  ambiguity of not knowing what might occur next.

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Characteristics (cont)

• Resource parents have acquired a basic
  satisfaction with where they are in life, with no
  significant, driving unmet needs.
• Resource parents demonstrate a willingness to
  share relationships with a child.
• Resource parents evidence resiliency when earlier
  losses were experienced.
• Resource parents demonstrate resourcefulness when
  confronted with challenges.
• Resource parents maintain positive connections
  with the community.
• Linda Zosche-Jefferson County Colorado

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Link Between . Characteristics Retention and
Recruitment
Building a link between resource family
characteristics and recruitment is based on the
hypothesis that if foster/resource families have
a well-developed understanding of their own
capacities and they can relate those capacities
to the needs of the children and families in the
system, it will result in more satisfied, less
conflicted resource/foster families. This could
result in greater retention---one of the
mainstays of a strong recruitment program.
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Mary Fords Work at NACAC

• As part of NACACs work in Minnesota, Mary Ford
  of NACAC is developing a training guide that will
  be published by the Department of Human Services.
  She strives in this guidebook to helping
  resource families understand their own philosophy
  and spiritual foundation and how this foundation
  or lack thereof will impact their role as a
  resource family.
• Further, during the training Ford asks
  prospective resource families a series of
  sensitive and thoughtful questions that go to the
  heart of the role of a resource family.
• These well-crafted self-assessment questions
  expose vulnerabilities and assets in ways that
  assist prospective resource families in coming to
  their own conclusions about their ability to be
  successful in this role.

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Some of the Questions Include

• Would you like to share a little bit about your
  philosophical, spiritual or religious belief
  system and how it helps you?
• What would you say to birth parents who said they
  were sorry for abusing or neglecting their child?
  
• How do you imagine sharing your foster child with
  other important people in this or her life?
• Is it important to you to be certain about the
  outcome of your placement? Why or Why not?
• Please describe how youve recovered when you
  experienced losses in your life.
• Mary Ford NACAC

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They are Attending to the Details!
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Attending To the DetailsKentuckys Model

• Kentucky began its efforts by flow-charting the
  details of the recruitment process.
• This provides an opportunity you to identify
  those points in the process when the prospective
  family can get lost ..
• Can it be streamlined? More Responsive? More
  Timely?
• For example, the initial phone callhow many of
  you have ever called your own system?
• Are those that answer the phone friendly?
• Are they informed?
• How many times are families transferred?
• Are materials sent in an expedient manner?
• Are the materials compelling?

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Flow Chart Your Processes
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Then Set Goals Based on What You Learn

• Creation of a conversion goal that __ of
  families that call attend the initial training.
• Creation of a conversion goal that __ of
  families who attend the initial training go on to
  complete the licensure process.
• Creation of a goal that ___ of families who
  complete the licensure process are still serving
  children and families 18 months later.

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They Are Effectively Using Performanced Based
Contracting

• A Partnership Model With the Private Community
  Based Organization

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Elements of Effective Performance Based
Contracting

• Statewide recruitment goals that are data driven.
• Regional/community/neighborhood recruitmentwith
  very specific recruitment targetsagain these
  targets are data driven.
• Tight Reporting Controls

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Statewide Goals linked to regional recruitment

• Based on statewide analysis of data gain
  consensus on priorities.
• While the goals are statewide how they are
  achieved is through the local counties, regions
  and communities
• In the state of Minnesota, NACAC has the
  contract to develop in partnership with the
  countiesregion specific recruitment and
  retention action plans that list the projected
  number and types of parents to be recruited.
• Plans include detailed recruitment strategies,
  locations for distributing materials, where and
  when presentations will be made including places
  of worship. PTAs, union gatherings, county fairs,
  etc.
• Video has been created to support the recruitment
  efforts
• New recruitment materials have been developed
  that are varied for audience.
• Regional specific retention activities

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Data-Driven Recruitment in Missouri

• Contracts Specify the numbers and types of homes
  required. (adolescents, sibling groups). Shelia
  Kitchen, was enthusiastic about the contracting
  model. She was clear that the greater the
  specificity in the regional plans, the more
  effective we are in recruitment of the kinds of
  families needed.
• The reality is that the more accurate and
  detailed information that the private providers
  have about the needs of the county regarding
  specific needs for homes, the better they are at
  recruiting accordingly.

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Data Driven Recruitment in Missouri

• Payments for very specific activities.
• Recruitment of a family who goes through the
  entire process from the point of the in-home
  consultation, training and licensure.
• In-home consultations
• Provision of the initial pre-service training
  session.
• Completed assessments where the foster/adoptive
  family applicant is found to be skilled in all
  competencies listed in STARS and is recommended
  for licensure as foster parents or approval as
  adoptive parents.
• Completed Adoption Assessments.
• In-service training provided to foster/adoptive
  families.
• Reassessment of foster/adoptive families.

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Utah takes it from the Region to the Neighborhood.
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Neighborhood Recruitment

• Contract awarded to a hybrid not-for-profit
  community organization named in Utah code the
  Utah Foster Care Foundation
• The turning point in our recruitment efforts was
  when the Board of Directors agreed that we should
  not conduct any major recruitment efforts until
  we fully understood the needs of the various
  regions of the state. We sought to understand
  the regional needs for homes for older children,
  sibling groups and children of diverse cultures.
  Then we had a clear message for the community
  recruitment efforts

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Neighborhood Recruitment -Utah

• Neighborhood Specific Needs are identified
•  
• Salt Lake Valley Metro Neighborhood
• There are placements for 28 of the children in
  care.
• 24 foster/adoptive homes, 43 placement capacity,
  9 empty homes and 21 openings.
• 152 children in care, 6 placements for any age
  child.
•  

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Utah Neighborhood Recruitment (cont)
 
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Utah Neighborhood Recruitment (cont.)

• These regional/neighborhood plans serve as the
  basis for the swat team approach used by
  Foundation staff.
• Once they compile the neighborhood data, using
  zip codes which assist in data analysis, they
  decide on a neighborhood to target and focus two
  months of recruitment within that targeted
  community.
• They contact newspapers where press releases and
  articles are published.
• They contact foster parents who assist in
  hosting open houses where community members come
  to learn more about foster parenting.
• One extremely effective recruitment strategy has
  been the partnerships that have been created with
  schools within the communities. The schools
  agree to distribute flyers announcing Open Houses
  and other community recruitment efforts.
• According to Kelsi Lewis, Director of the
  Foundation It is remarkable the number of
  families who attend the community gatherings with
  these flyers in hand. We are very grateful to the
  schools for their support of our recruitment
  efforts.

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Tight Reporting Requirements
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Effective Elements of Performance Based
ContractingReporting Requirements

• Tight Reporting RequirementsOn a monthly basis
  the private providers must report on the
  following
• Number of inquiries from potential
  foster/adoptive families
• Number of in-home consultations
• Number and names of foster/adoptive family
  applicants who withdrew or were selected out of
  the foster/adoptive application process.
• Number and names of foster/adoptive family
  applicants beginning pre-service training.
• General description of the recruitment activities
  provided by the contractor during the month.

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Child Specific Recruitment --Maine

• A critical aspect of Maines evolving recruitment
  effort is to provide dollars focused on
  child-specific recruitment.
• When children are coming out of the state system
  as legal risk adoption, the state makes it a
  point to recruit and certify homes specifically
  for that child.
• In hard to places cases, private agencies are
  provided information about the kind of home
  needed for the specific child and the private
  agency focuses on recruitment.

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When a child being placed in a home really needs
a male role modelA seasoned foster father in
Maine takes action

• According to Stephan Duplessis of Maine .The
  foster father is often forgotten in the process
  of fosteringit is the foster mom who is the
  focus of recruitment messages and support
  efforts. My goal is to reach out to the
  potential foster father and help them understand
  the nature and importance of their role.
• As a member of the Advisory Committee for FACT
  (Families and Children Together), a
  community-based organization that has a contract
  with the state for the recruitment of foster
  families in Maine, Steffan takes it upon himself
  to contact prospective foster fathers. In these
  conversations, he seeks to understand if the
  foster father is able to identify what they hope
  to both give and get out of the fostering
  experience. Steffan suggests If the individual
  cannot talk about his desire for some kind of
  connection with the child, I worry that he is not
  fully understanding his role. The male role
  model is critical to these children, and often to
  their families. I try to help the prospective
  foster father find his place in the fostering
  process.

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Good Luck!
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A Look At How Various Policy Initiatives Are
Impacting Recruitment and Retention
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Policy and its Impact on Recruitment and
Retention

• Dual Licensure
• Full Disclosure
• Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect Allegations

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Background on Dual Licensure
Historical child welfare practice did not allow
foster parents to adopt or they strongly
discouraged them from doing so through written
and unwritten rules. As recently as the early
1970s, most public adoption agencies had
policies against practice of foster parent
adoption.
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Reasons Included

• Fear of losing their valuable cadre of foster
  families.
• Fear that foster families hoping to adopt, would
  undermine attempts to attain the primary goal of
  family reunification.
• Historical licensure processes that were based on
  a foster families ability to provide temporary
  care, not a lifetime commitment.
• Decisions to place a child in a particular foster
  home frequently were based on available space and
  not because a foster family was determined to be
  the best possible match for a particular child

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For these reasons and others, a child who became
freed for adoption and who was doing well living
with a foster family, would have in the past been
moved to another family without allowing the
foster parent to have any input into the process
of selection of the adoptive family or even
continued contact with the child, thus
exacerbating the childs experiences with loss,
lack of continuity and permanent relationships.
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Today, child welfare practice reflects a very
different picture.

• The increasing reality is that foster parents,
  and not newly recruited adoptive parents, have
  come to serve as the most consistent and viable
  option for permanence for children in care.

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According to the Childrens Bureau Express, 64
of children adopted from the child welfare system
are adopted by their foster parents (although not
necessarily the families with whom they were
first placed). Not only are foster parents
adopting children in their care, but according to
the National Adoption Information Clearinghouse,
these placements are very successful with 94
percent of these adoptions remaining intact
throughout the life of the child.
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The Promise of Permanency
It appears that the promise of permanency for
children in the child welfare system who are
unable to return to their birth parents, lies in
many instances with their foster parents
relatives or non-relatives. Because of this,
seasoned child welfare staff have been working to
ensure that once a foster family has bonded with
the child and made the commitment to adopt, the
standards, rules and process of transitioning
from a foster parent to an adoptive parent is as
smooth and seamless as possible. In this vein,
some child welfare agencies are beginning to
explore the development of dual licensure
policy and practice.
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• Dual licensure means that foster parents and
  adoptive parents walk through the same screening
  and interview, home study, training and
  background check processes, and in the end
  receive the same approval to provide foster
  and/or adoptive care.
• Dual licensure allows for a foster parent, who
  has cared for a child for some length of time, to
  naturally and easily change their role from that
  of a foster parent to an adoptive parent, without
  having to go through an entirely new home study
  and training process.

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Comments from State Representatives
Scott Dixon, Foster Care Specialist from the
State of Texas has an interesting perspective.
It used to be that when foster parents adopted
children, they were perceived as seeking a back
door adoption. By opening the process up, it
allows both adoptive parents and foster parents
to be completely honest about their struggles and
their motivations. While a foster family may be
very clear that they do not want to adopt every
child that comes into their home, if one comes
who has no other place to go and the family bonds
with that childthey have a choiceone that they
can discuss openly while making an informed
decision.   Kit Hansen, President of the Utah
Foster Parent Association and foster mother
agrees. About eight years ago I remember
vividly a circumstance where two children who had
been in foster care for eight months, were
abruptly pulled from the foster home and never
saw the family again. These children were
attached to the foster family and the foster
family was devastated at the loss. This should
never occur.  
 
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Comment from the Childrens Bureau
Patsy Buida, the Foster Care Specialist at the
Childrens Bureau ACF/DHHS suggests It (dual
licensure) is a tool to maximize use of resource
families in a flexible way that lets them decide
how to interface with the system and what type of
parenting fits their lifestyleshort-term foster
care or long term adoption. If a family has
committed to and bonded with a child, it makes no
sense to search any longer. Social workers spend
a considerable amount of time being anxious about
the fact that we dont always know enough during
our first placement to make the best match
between the child and the resource family. We
want to move children because we learn more about
the kind of family that would be the best
match. We need to get more comfortable in doing
the best we can with the information we have.
Timely permanence is as important, if not more
important as a perfect match.  
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PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS
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Practice Implication 1Child and Family
Matching Becomes an Earlier Concern.

• Difficulty in finding/making the right
  placement match between children and families, if
  the first placement is truly is to be the
  last/best.
• Dual licensure encourages earlier placements with
  resource families who can support the
  reunification process and also serve as permanent
  resource if children cannot return to their
  parents.
• It may mean that staff will need to make
  placements with resource families without the
  same amount of information about the child and
  the family-- as was common practice in adoptive
  or even pre-adoptive placements

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Practice Implication 2 Family-Centered Practice
and Reunification Continue to Be a Critically
Important Focus.

• The practice framework for dual licensure needs
  to be rooted in family-centered principles and
  strategies a framework that seeks to preserve
  childrens ties to their families of origin by
  involving other related or non-related family
  resources to support that process and serve as
  backup permanent resource if needed.
• If a child is placed with a foster/adoptive
  family, overburdened child welfare staff may see
  a child as safe and successfully placed in a
  home that can serve as a permanent option if
  needed, and therefore may not work as diligently
  towards reunification.
• Staff will need to be provided a toolbox of
  resources to support this approach to practice
  such as family-centered assessment instruments,
  consistent and frequent supervision, a pool of
  resource families who understand their role as
  mentor to the birth parents, and a practice model
  that supports open and inclusive case planning
  with parents and resource families.

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Practice Implication 3Systems Re-organization
Supports Dual Licensure and Enhances Continuity
of Relationships For Children With Families and
Staff

• States and counties that have been successful in
  implementing a dual licensure model have
  reorganized their systems in ways that support
  earlier planning and decision-making around
  permanency for children.
• Rather than having separate foster care and
  adoptive units, many have combined these units
  and integrated practice.
• In these reorganized units, a single worker stays
  with the child regardless of the outcomes of the
  case, i.e. reunification, guardianship or
  adoption.
• With this continuity of relationship, the child
  and family do not have to tell their story more
  than once, and the worker who was with the child
  during the attempted reunification phase,
  supports the child in the transition to the goal
  of adoption, should that be necessary.

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Practice Implication 4Keep the pool growing
Ongoing recruitment is urgently needed.

• States were concerned that by encouraging foster
  parents to become adoptive parents they would
  substantively and dangerously diminish their pool
  of foster parents.
• While this is in fact a reality, most individuals
  surveyed believe that timely permanency for
  children is worth the extra demands it places on
  the system to continually recruit and train new
  foster parents as resources for children and
  families.
• Dual licensure requires intensive efforts on the
  part of public and private agencies to expand
  their recruitment efforts and often require a
  shift in the message about the role of a diverse
  pool of families who can meet the complex needs
  of children and families.

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Practice Implication 5Resource Family
Understanding and Support of the Permanency
Planning Process is Critical

• Dual licensure is likely to be successfully
  implemented when resource families understand and
  can support the process of Permanency Planning
  a process which is grounded in the belief that
  whenever safely possible, reasonable efforts
  should be made to help children remain with or be
  returned to their birth families and that
  parents, foster parents and agencies must work
  together to achieve the range of permanency
  outcomes.

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Full Disclosure As a Practice Model
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Full Disclosure
It honors the integrity of the process and
ensures that birth parents and resource parents
have the same information, thereby allowing them
to make informed decisions. Full disclosure
provides the birth parents with a lay of the
land and a road map of what needs to occur and
when, if their children are to be returned home.

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Full DisclosureDid You?

• Explain permanency planning timeframes to the
  parents?
• Discuss the range of permanency planning options
  with the parents?
• Discuss service plan and assessment process with
  parents/family?
• Discuss and agree to a mutually satisfactory
  visitation plan?
• Discuss purpose, types and behavioral
  expectations of visitation.

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Full DisclosureDid You?

• Talk with the birth parents/family about your
  role as a representative of the agency?
•  
• Talk with the birth parents/family about the
  role of the resource family?

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Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect Allegations

• How Does This Impact Recruitment and Retention?

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