Resources Covering Both Recruitment and Retention

• Recruitment and Retention of Resource Families: The Promise and the Paradox
  Sixty-four percent of children adopted from the child welfare system in 1996 were adopted by their foster parents. These dedicated "resource families" were willing to commit to the children in their care regardless of the outcomes. If this trend persists, we will lose many of these families from the pool of available resource families. However, the recruitment of resource families is a tremendous challenge to state child welfare systems. This paper provides an overview of the messages and unique approaches of eight states with innovative and rigorous recruitment efforts.

• Breakthrough Series Collaborative: Recruitment and Retention of Resource Families
  This 2005 report from Casey Family Programs illustrates the use of the Breakthrough Series Collaborative (BSC) methodology and describes the successful strategies and lessons learned by the twenty-two public child welfare agencies who participated in this BSC on Recruitment and Retention.

• Listening to Parents: Overcoming Barriers to the Adoption of Children From Foster Care
  This study was designed to explore the question of why, despite an increasing demand for children to adopt and active adoptive family recruitment efforts, few “general applicants” (those who were not the children's relatives or foster parents) adopt children from foster care. It makes a number of recommendations in the areas of screening vs recruitment of families, first contact, matching, training, use of a buddy system, and listening to prospective parents.

• Creating Foster Care Capacity for Abused and Neglected Children
  This policy paper from the Center for Public Policy Priorities examines the problem of an insufficient number of foster homes in Texas, and makes recommendations for capacity building.

• Recruiting Foster Parents
  This report was developed by the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services. It focuses on States' efforts to recruit foster care families. (May 2002)

• Parent Recruitment and Training: A Crucial, Neglected Child Welfare Strategy
  This report from the National Council for Adoption discusses state allocation of available federal child welfare funds to parent recruitment and training.

• Partners: Working with the Business Community to Recruit Resource Families
  This handbook is designed to help agencies recruit resource families by actively engaging the business community, including both the public and private sectors. Each section of the handbook starts with a checklist of the key questions that agencies need to answer. Within each section are Hints and Tips that offer additional ideas and Program Highlights that illustrate how each technique has been used in practice. The handbook includes sections on Getting Started, Developing a Partnership, Working with Your Partner, and Funding the Initiative. The appendix includes many tools, including a sample press release, newsletter article, and focus group discussion guide, all of which can be adapted for use.

• Individualized and Targeted Recruitment for Adoption
  This document from Casey Family Programs National Center for Resource Family Support looks at some child-specific and targeted recruitment efforts that have achieved results.

• A Community Outreach Handbook for Recruiting Foster Parents and Volunteers
  The handbook, written by Kathy Barbell and Lisa Sheikh, is offered here in an on-line version, which you can download and read for your personal use. You can purchase printed copies of the handbook directly from the Child Welfare League of America through the Publications section of their web site.

Resources on Retention

• Relationship Between Public Child Welfare Workers, Resource Families and Birth Families: Preventing the Triangulation of the Triangle of Support
  In this paper written for the NRCFCPPP, consultant Lorrie L. Lutz, M.P.P., discusses lessons learned in facilitated dialogues around the country with birth families, resource families, and child welfare workers. Insights from each of these partners in the care of children in the child welfare system reveal why agencies struggle with the process of building relationships among these three sets of people so important in the life of a child. Yet challenging or not, if a child is to be well served, it is the responsibility of public child welfare systems to find a way to build relationships between these three components and to preventing the triangulation of the triangle of support around the child.

• Understanding Foster Parenting: Using Administrative Data to Explore Retention
  This report from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, uses data from three States to explore the relationships among foster parent characteristics, activity levels, and length of service.

• Retaining Foster Parents
  This report was developed by the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services. It focuses on States' efforts to recruit foster care families. (May 2002)

• Resource Family Retention: An Overview
  The basic elements of resource family retention.

• Child Care Services for Children in Out-of-Home Care
  Comprehensive child care programs can play a significant role in strengthening and supporting children and families in out-of-home care. Increasingly, subsidized child care is seen as a means to help recruit and retain foster and adoptive parents as well as kinship caregivers.This document from Casey Family Programs will assist policy makers, child care administrators, social workers, and others in developing, funding, and expanding child care services that meet the needs of families and children in out-of-home care

• Retaining Recruited Foster Families
  A policy brief from the National Resource Center on Adoption.

Resources from the States

• Ohio:
  
  • Child Specific Recruitment: Ohio's Promising Practices
    Many of the public children services agencies (PCSAs) in Ohio have improved on various measures of adoption success, such as the total number of adoptions and the timeliness of adoptions. Much of the improvement in timely adoptions is credited to foster-to-adopt efforts. For many children, however, achievement of a finalized adoption may require child specific efforts to find an adoptive family. This report focuses on those efforts, specifically as they relate to children over the age of nine, African American children and those who have been in care more than two years.

  • Eye on Recruitment: Who Are Ohio's Adoptive Families?
    This report is designed to assist both ODJFS and the public and private agencies providing adoption services in Ohio in identifying where they need to focus their recruitment and retention efforts for prospective adoptive parents.

  • Recruitment and Retention of African American Resource Families
    This report is intended to identify promising practices among the larger Public Children Services Agencies (PCSAs) in Ohio around the recruitment and retention of African American resource parents. It explores the strategies those PCSAs which have the best records in complying with this aspect of the law (as measured at the end of federal fiscal year 2005) use to develop and maintain their pools of adoptive parents.

  • Waiting Families, Waiting Children
    This report is designed to assist ODJFS in identifying where it needs to focus its recruitment and retention efforts for prospective adoptive parents to ensure that all of its children achieve permanency.

• New York: Supporting the Needs of Foster Parents: Recommendations
  These recommendations from the New York State Office of Children & Family Services resulted from the analysis of the findings from a Foster Parent Training and Support Assessment that was conducted with foster parents and foster care workers statewide. The recommendations are intended to assist local districts and voluntary agencies in assessing and supporting their partnerships with foster parents.

NRCFCPPP Information Packets

• Child Specific Recruitment by Kristine Schuerger (August 2002)

PowerPoint Presentations

• Retaining Foster Families
  NRCFCPPP summary of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General Report (May 2002)

• Recruitment of Resource Families: The Promise and the Paradox
  Presentation by Lorrie Lutz, consultant to the NRCFCPPP. (March 2002)

• Recruitment and Retention of Resource Families
  Presentation by Lorrie Lutz, consultant for the NRCFCPPP. (October 2002)

• AdoptUsKids
  The Collaboration to AdoptUsKids is a project of The Children's Bureau. In October 2002, The Children's Bureau contracted with The Adoption Exchange Association and its partners (The Collaboration to AdoptUsKids) to devise and implement a national adoptive family recruitment and retention strategy, operate the AdoptUsKids.org website, encourage and enhance adoptive family support organizations and conduct a variety of adoption research projects. The Promising Approaches and Resources page offers a wealth of emerging ideas and ideas from the field.

• Foster/Adoptive Parents
  This section of the Child Welfare Information Gateway website contains strategies, tools, and organizations to help professionals identify, recruit, prepare, and retain foster, adoptive, and kinship families.

• Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption
  The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption supplies a variety of communication materials to adoption agencies and organizations. All of these resources are available at no cost. They include videos, PSAs, posters, and written materials.

                                                                                                                             
Last updated 03/02/08