Here at REFORM talk much of what we will talk about will not be uplifting and cheery because that is simply not the state of so much going on in adoption and child welfare today. We can be cynical having seen too much carnage to be very positive about the system. However, I was pleased to read Time Magazine’s Jan 10, 2011 issue which has an article called, “Foster Care: Extreme Edition” about a program for children in St. Louis foster care. The program is called Extreme Recruitment aptly named by the executive director, Melanie Scheetz, who got the idea after watching Extreme Home Makeover. She wondered if the same principles for organizing a professional team to put up houses could be applied to placing children in adoptive homes. Hokie as the name may be, the program is a serious out of the box effort to place older children currently in foster care and employs a team including private detectives who track down relatives of children who cannot live with their parents due to neglect and abuse. Remarkably, the minimum number of family members found per child is 40 and an investigator once found 113 family members for one child. They then work to identify the family’s “gem.” This is the person who is stable and most prepared to care for the child. Scheetz claims every family has one and if they haven’t found them they haven’t looked hard enough. I like her line of thinking.
It is an interesting twist to family preservation. Children who are over age ten and considered hard to place are in this program and extended relatives are sought out for adoptive placements. Kevin Campbell, a foster care consultant who was credited with family finding efforts, is quoted as saying, “Before giving kids to strangers, we should be making sure they don’t have family members who can take care of them.”
The article cites a recent Cornell University study which revealed 53% of prospective adoptive parents who have a family connection with a child will complete an adoption compared to 4% who don’t. In addition, biological and extended families are more willing and may be more successful at raising their young children with special needs and who sometimes have mental illness. The article states, ”It’s possible that bipolar disorder runs in the family and that the great-grandmother considering adopting the child is already familiar with the condition because her niece has it too.”
One of the additional benefits of this program is that the child’s team checks in with each other once a week. Certainly much better than US programs that have lost foster children! And the program has a goal of finding families for the children in 12-20 weeks. Also much better than the years and multiple placements many children in the system experience.
Although the program is too new for its successes and failures to be adequately measured it sounds promising. I cannot imagine it could be any worse than what we have now in domestic foster placements with their many dismal failures documented here:
http://poundpuplegacy.org/It goes on to say that the program isn’t perfect and not all matches work out, but even in those situations the child is able to build relationships with family members they track down.
One thing the article does not mention is whether any post-placement support, resources or supervision are provided to ensure these placements succeed.
If this model succeeds in keeping more children in their families, albeit extended ones, and out of multiple foster care placements I wonder what the possibilities are for this type of model to be used globally? It sounds innovative and child centered—something worth watching.
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