September/October 2011Vol. 12, No. 7Site Visit: A Parent for Every Child

More than 3,700 children in New York State are eligible and waiting to be adopted. On average, they have been legally free for adoption for more than 7 years and in care more than 11 years. Of those children, about 1,500 do not have an identified adoption resource. To address this problem, the New York State Office of Children and Family Services received a grant from the Children's Bureau to establish the program A Parent for Every Child (PFEC). Its goal is to find permanent families for at least 50 youth who are available for adoption.

The targeted group includes children who reside in a facility licensed or operated by the following:

New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH)
NYS Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities (OMRDD)
Office of Children and Family Services’ (OCFS) juvenile justice facilities

The target group also includes youth residing in child welfare residential or congregate care, who have a permanency goal other than adoption. PFEC will recruit a pool of families willing to adopt these children with special needs and provide training on their unique parenting requirements.

Specific actions that PFEC staff have taken are the following:

Conducted a public awareness campaign to dispel misconceptions about the adoption of youth with disabilities
Implemented targeted recruiting to match these youth with resource families with the skills and commitment to meet their needs
Developed specialized training for families without experience who are open to adopting children with disabilities
Engaged Adoption Navigators—experienced adoptive parents who help potential adoptive parents navigate the system and overcome barriers
Identified successful recruiting practices that will work for the target population
Collaborated through a statewide partnership with private agencies to implement promising practices such as child-specific permanency recruitment through family search and engagement and activities and media that feature waiting children

One highlight of the project is the development of Adoption Chronicles, which are video interviews that provide prospective parents with indepth profiles of children. Another feature of the project is the Child Survey and Database, which facilitates the staff's ability to capture data that measure PFEC's effects on intervention and control group children and youth. The database also functions as a case management tool (e.g., contacts, recruitment strategies, milestones, child characteristics, and needs).

Among the challenges the staff experienced are separating State agency and project responsibilities, the poor economy and staff layoffs, agency closures, lack of continuing care, and incomplete files for children.

After the first year planning period, the project experienced several successes:

Identification of resource families for 12 children
Development of data collection instruments
Significant data cleanup of New York State's Child Care Review System, which tracks children in foster care
Training for all PFEC Permanency Specialists on:
- National Resource Center for Adoption's "Adoption Competency Curriculum"
- Family search and engagement from the National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections
- Family finding by Kevin Campbell
Improvements in making the children and youth in the target population a priority on agency agendas
Increased awareness of the need for wraparound, adoption-competent, postadoption services

Learn more by visiting:
http://www.parentforeverychild.org

A Parent for Every Child is funded by the Children's Bureau (Award #90CO1038) as part of Adoption Opportunities: Diligent Recruitment of Families for Children in the Foster Care System. This article is part of a series highlighting successful Children's Bureau grant-funded projects around the country, emerging from Children's Bureau site visits.

The full site visit report will soon be posted on the Child Welfare Information Gateway website:
http://www.childwelfare.gov/management/funding/funding_sources/cbreports.cfm