Transcript www.brantfacs.ca

The Journey To
Kinship Care and
Kinship Service
within Brant CAS
The Guidlelines for Alternative Care of Children
authored by the United Nations (2009) states:
“Alternative Care may be “kinship care family based care
within the child’s extended family or with close relatives or
with close friends of the family, known to the child, whether
formal or informal in nature” (section III)”
The Brant CAS has successfully incorporated
these transformation initiatives:
Currently:
 36 kinship in care arrangements
 46 kinship service arrangements
 133 traditional foster families
Since 2004:
 We have serviced between 45 and 63 kinship in care
families annually
Case Management:
 Kinship in care files are managed within our
Resource Development Unit
 The vast majority of our kinship service
files are managed within the community
team responsible for the linked family
service file

Experience shows that the maternal family
is most often involved in providing kinship
care
Our Beginnings

In the early 2000’s Brant began our journey
towards kinship care and service

In part due to the huge influx of children
into care post the 1999 amendments to the
CFSA and the resulting stressors on our
traditional foster care system

Provisional homes grew from episodic to
full caseload
We opened some homes because that was the only
place the child would stay
 We opened other homes because our traditional
system was not meeting the needs of the child

Challenges Within the Field:
 We needed to confront our biases and the bias of
the field
 Workers were often hesitant to consider family/kin
 Traditional thinking :
 “an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree “

We began to recognize that while we looked to
family for necessity – in fact we began to learn many
valuable lessons

Tragedies such as Jeffery Baldwin’s death in
care of his maternal grandparents while
supervised by CCAS in Toronto highlighted a
need to understand the complex issues
related to kinship caregiving

Our thinking began to change to:
 “one bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole
basket.”

Within our agency we began to consider could we understand the journey of the
kinship care applicant through the child
welfare system and mitigate risks and
articulate strengths and growth and benefits
to the child




We had to endure the questioning of
community and partners who wondered
what possessed us to approve that couple
and others as a foster home
We learned from experience that kin
offered something different, unique, and
sustaining to our children requiring out of
home placements
The placements were longer lasting than the
traditional foster care
American research in 2007 identified that:
 82% of children in kinship homes remained in their
placements after one year compared to 65% of children
in traditional foster care.(Rock & Testa)

Australian researchers noted that:
 Children who experienced a breakdown in placement in
the first four months of foster care went on to become
members of the “serially evicted” (frequent flyers)
children likely to face a significant number of moves or
disruptions. (Barber & Dafoe 2006)

We identified that the provisional homes
likely had stressors in the areas of:
 Employment
 Income
 Housing


These stressors were exacerbated by the
unexpected addition of a child or children
Trust was also a challenge as it wasn’t
unusual that the family may have had
previous contact with the agency

Divided loyalties were also an issue
 “I am the Grandmother and will protect the children, I
am also her/his mother and want her/him to recover “
We needed to recognize that saying family
and payment in the same sentence was
acceptable
 Bias held within the field was that family
should not have to be paid to care for family
 Research in the field began to support our
experiences

 Kinship placements offer children greater opportunity
for continuity and stability than foster homes or group
homes ( Gambrill & Patterson 2002)
 Kinship placements have greater longevity than foster
care situations, kinship homes are more likely to
accept sibling groups and sustain those relationships,
and most children and parents would prefer that
children live with family members or friends than with
strangers. ( Barth, Guo, Green and McCrae 2007)


Proclamation of Bill 210 in late 2006 provided
structure to both kinship service and kinship
care within the continuum of services available
to children and their families.
However, while kinship care families were
supported by perdiems and entitlements to
children, kinship service received only
episodic, unsustainable support
Challenges & Ongoing Learning &
Development
Kinship service families require the same
ongoing support as kinship care families to
navigate the system they are enveloped in, by
virtue of stepping forward to assist when a
crisis occurs requiring placement
 Kinship families have taught us to understand
their experience of the social work definition
of permanency;

 Adoption is not always palatable to them
 Adoption means their child, their sibling will never recover

By listening to families we can weave a fabric of
permanency around the child creatively
outside the forever solution of adoption
Kinship Families:
When the child is initially in care, struggle
when the long term solution is out of care
 Without ongoing financial support the kin
families are placed in a position of needing to
make decisions related to finances when
considering if they can provide long term care

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Workers have had to consider bringing a child
into care to meet the financial needs of the
caregivers…and maintain the placement
stability…all contrary to the spirit of the
legislation permitting kinship solutions for
children in need of placements
Kinship families frequently enter our system
being part of a short term solution
 Experience is teaching us that the short
term transitions to long term and families
are being asked to consider:

 Adoption,
 Custody
 Post secondary education expenses
 If they can support the child and meet his/her
needs through to adulthood, needs that
frequently require counseling, and other
therapeutic interventions …frequently large
ticket items financially and emotionally
Guidelines for Alternative Care of
Children authored by United
nations states:
“financial and material poverty or conditions
directly and uniquely imputable to such poverty ,
should never be the only justification for
removing a child from parental care, for receiving
a child into alternative care or for preventing
his/her reintegration, but should be seen as a
signal for the need to provide appropriate
support to the family”
Planning for Our Crown Wards:

Looking to the family and extended family
via Family Group Decision Making

Logical linkage between kinship care and
transition planning for youth in care
PRIDE (Parent Resources for
Information, Development and Education)
Implementation of PRIDE in 2007 has
brought kinship care, adoptive and foster care
applicants together for training
 The PRIDE curriculum is provided by
representatives from all three areas
 Adoptive and foster care applicants have
commented that the kinship care families
deserve respect as their role is complicated
and more difficult than families who do not
have a prior connection with the birth family
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It is a challenge to get kinship families to
commit to attending PRIDE due in large
part to the significant demands on their
time meeting needs of children already
placed….
SAFE
(Structured Assessment Family Evaluation)
SAFE - implemented in 2006 strength
based, linked to LAC & PRIDE
 Articulates the mitigation of risk and ability
to change and resiliency of these applicants

Closing and Future

Currently we are meeting with kinship
care and kinship service families to assist
us to develop mechanisms to better
prepare them for the “cycle of kin”

Developing a tool for workers to offer at
the first contact:
 Getting families to know where their journey
may take them
 To assist workers to more fully understand the
complex journey of kin children