If you missed it, Ampersand Families, a local agency in Minnesota, made an appearance on KFAI's Morning Blend show in February to discuss finding permanency for older youth in care - the teens. Ampersand Families focuses on recruitment and placement for this population. You can hear Jen Braun, co-founder and co-executive officer at Ampersand, discuss [...]
A wonderful resource for those interested in youth aging out of the foster care system, the documentary From Place to Place follows two young adults, Mandy and Raif, as they share their lives and travel to Washington DC to advocate for system change. View the trailer: Their story is also documented in this article featured [...]
Lucinda Jesson, Commissioner of Minnesota Department of Human Services, appeared on KARE-11 to encourage people to consider adopting African American youth in foster care in Minnesota. Commissioner Jesson spoke of meeting one youth who, at age 17, was adopted. Commissioner Jesson also encouraged anyone interested in learning more about adoption to visit the mnadopt.org website. [...]
[Photo by Catherine Green for LA Weekly] The LA Weekly published a story last Thursday about the story of one young man struggling to find his way after aging out of the system, and a family that has informally offered resources and support. This story deftly describes the many ways in which young adults aging [...]
Two weeks ago the City Limits newspaper published a series by Rachel Blustain on what she termed, "broken adoptions" - that is, adoption dissolutions. Photo by Marc Fader for City Limits. The numbers of how many adoptions fail is a tough statistic to obtain, in part because many adoption dissolutions occur years afer an adoption [...]
The Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare (CASCW) will graduate its first cohort of 39 adoption-competent mental health and child welfare workers through CASCW's Permanency and Adoption Competency Certificate (PACC) program today. The graduation celebration will take place from 4 PM to 6 PM in the Minnesota Commons Room at the University of Minnesota [...]
A webinar on engaging families around kinship care is available from the Florida's Center for the Advancement of Child Welfare Practice. This video could be helpful for practitioners looking for stragegies when working with families to provide kinship care. This video was created in 2008. Jack Levine and Ron Morris developed this video training. They [...]
I recently came across this resource from the National Resource Center for Adoption, part of the Children's Bureau network of Technical Assistance programs. The Youth Permanency Cluster or YPC, is a group of demonstration projects funded in October 2005 during which sites worked to create, implement and evaluate strategies for achieving permanency for youth that [...]