Articles

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) sent letters to 39 governors in January, calling for “immediate action to protect vulnerable foster youth” from having their federal benefits seized by local governments and used to pay for their care and custody. The widely critiqued practice amounts to children forfeiting their own money to pay for […]

President Donald Trump celebrated his landmark legislative package and its tax-and-spending cuts in July with a ceremonial bill signing punctuated by B-2 bombers flying over the White House. But child welfare experts and advocates for children and families predict the impact on the ground will create new survival challenges for millions of the most vulnerable […]

The nonprofit agencies that serve some of the Central Valley’s most vulnerable youth have found themselves stuck between the proverbial rock and the hardest of decisions. After the largest insurer of nonprofit foster care agencies across California announced it was pulling out of the market and would not renew policies last year, organizations had a […]

A significant piece of child welfare legislation made it through Congress at the end of the year and was signed by former President Joe Biden. The Protecting America’s Children by Strengthening Families Act is a renewal of what’s known as the Title IV-B program, which distributes hundreds of millions of dollars to states each year […]

Growing up with four older siblings and an adoptive mom and dad, Misty Coonce played the role of mediator and protector at her home in Hastings, Minnesota. Sometimes she’d take the blame for her siblings’ minor misdeeds. Other times, Coonce, now 39, would simply hear them out when they felt unseen or would mediate squabbles […]

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the right of Native children to remain with their families and tribes, reaffirming for the first time, the Indian Child Welfare Act. The measure regulates the adoption and fostering of Indigenous children. Because a tribe’s most precious resource is its children, the ruling — and the history of the […]

National Foster Parent Association takes a leadership role in mobilizing foster parent voices In 2019, Marissa Sanders was worried about a plan to move all West Virginia children in foster care into managed healthcare. As an adoptive parent and director of the West Virginia Foster, Adoptive and Kinship Parents Network, she was concerned that the […]

Federal Study Underway to Understand ‘Reasonable Efforts’ Findings Judges Make New research now underway and funded by the Children’s Bureau of the Administration for Children and Families, seeks to better understand factors that influence reasonable efforts findings by judges and how these findings relate to case outcomes, such as the likelihood of reunification and the […]