Helping Extended Families Care for their Kin
Nearly a quarter of all foster children live with relatives as foster parents. Although these arrangements may seem preferable to nonrelative foster care, only 50 percent of relatives caring for foster children receive the subsidies that are usually paid to other foster parents. Relative foster parents are also often grandparents with limited financial resources.
The Children’s Home & Aid Relative Foster Care program provides services to children who are placed in foster care with maternal or paternal relatives. These children have a wide range of needs. The program works with the biological family to assess the reasons why the child came into care, and provides services to address the acute needs including expenses, day-to-day caregiving, schooling, tutoring, housing, and family conflict resolution. The family also receives supportive services and the goal is to establish and achieve a permanency plan for the child.
Children’s Home & Aid recognizes, respects, promotes and celebrates the value of cultural diversity and will ensure that each client’s ethnic or cultural customs, practices, and beliefs, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, disability, and/or community differences will be respected by agency staff.