Strategies to Recruit and Retain Families

Celebrate National Foster Care Month this May
National Foster Care Month provides a great opportunity for child welfare agencies to celebrate and honor the foster families who open their homes and hearts to children needing care. It is also a time to reflect on the resilience of the more than 2 million foster care alumni living in our country today. Find ways to celebrate

Tools to Help You

Supporting and Retaining Foster and Adoptive Parents
Check out our free recruitment and retention resources for the newest promising practices to assist in your efforts to honor foster, adoptive, and kinship families by supporting them all year round. A great place to start for ideas is our Every Month is Customer Service Month (PDF – 107 KB) resource that provides simple ways to integrate customer service principles into your daily work.

Building Relationships Between Resource Parents and Birth Parents
The Annie E. Casey Foundation recently released the resource Icebreaker Meetings: Building Relationships Between Birth and Foster Parents to support implementing facilitated conversations between birth and resource parents, often with contributions from the child, about the child’s needs. The toolkit gives an overview of these meetings, describes a work group process for planning and implementation with a self-assessment tool, identifies common barriers and roadblocks, shares steps that are often overlooked or missed, and provides success stories and sample materials developed by agencies across the country.

The Impact of Federal Legislation on Child Welfare
A new factsheet from Child Welfare Information Gateway titled How Federal Legislation Impacts Child Welfare Service Delivery provides an overview of the process by which legislative actions and policy changes at the federal level affect state and tribal child welfare systems and service delivery.