By Dana Mandolesi on March 11, 2010
There is still time to sign-up for the webinar!
There are over 10 million victims of identity theft nationwide and over $56 billion lost each year because of fraudulent activities. In 2007, there were 1 million children who had their identities stolen in the United States. Children from foster care are twice as likely to become a victim of identity theft.
Join us on Tuesday, March 16, 2010 from 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. for a free webinar training on protecting former foster youth from identity theft. The goal of the webinar is to provide social workers, educators in both K-12 and higher education, advocates, caregivers, and community organizations on ways to prevent, detect and resolve identity theft issues.
Participants will learn about resources and recommendations on how they can assist their foster youth in securing their private information. A panel of experts from the California Office of Privacy Protection, Public Counsel, Los Angeles County Department of Consumer Affairs, and the Alliance for Children’s Rights will address the following topic areas;
Why foster youth are vulnerable to fraud and identity theft.
Tips foster youth need to know to prevent identity theft.
Models/best practices and resources that can assist foster youth who have had their identity stolen.
Vital documents foster youth will need during their transition into college and how to protect those documents.
Title: Identity Theft and Vital Documents: Protecting Foster Youth From Fraud
Date: Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Time: 10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
How to participate: Audio for the training will be available through your computer or a call-in number.
Registration: To register and receive log-in and audio instructions, click here.
Ample time will be provided to answer your questions. For more information, contact Jenny Vinopal at (562) 951-4734 or jvinopal@calstate.edu
To learn more about California College Pathways, visit www.cacollegepathways.org
Posted in Community Opportunities, Upcoming Events | Tagged california, california college pathways, college, documents, financial aid, foster youth, identity theft, training, university, vital documents, webinar
By admin on February 28, 2010
[from the Foster Youth Alliance, FYA Bulletin 2/24/10]
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the far-reaching decision handed down by U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel on Monday in the case brought by The California Alliance of Child & Family Services. The judge ruled that the state must increase by 32% the rates it pays group homes caring for foster youth. The Courthouse News Service also covered the ruling, quoting Carroll Schroeder, Executive Director of the California Alliance: “Judge Patel’s ruling means that kids who need the level of care provided by group homes will finally receive the funding for care they need and deserve.”
Posted in State Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged california, california alliance of child and family services, foster youth, group homes, payments
By admin on February 1, 2010
[note from Amy Lemley, of the John Burton Foundation for Children Without Homes 1/28/09]
AB 12 passed in the Assembly yesterday with a final vote of 72 to 0! The bill had strong bipartisan support, with both Democrats and Republicans speaking on the floor about how AB 12 will better support youth in their transition from foster care.
Of considerable help was yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, which ran an editorial urging the Legislature to pass AB 12. This is the second editorial by the paper in support of extending foster care to age 21. It states, “With a $20-billion budget gap, California needs every penny it can get from the federal government, and now that the child welfare money actually can be spent on helping youth rather than supporting outmoded programs, the state must grab it. Too often, rules limit the usefulness of federal money. Not this time. AB 12 allows the state to multiply the power of its dollars many times over. Lawmakers should not miss the rare chance to simultaneously save money and help Californians in need.”
To read the full editorial in the LA Times, follow this LINK.
Thank you to everyone who has worked to get AB 12 this far. After our request for letters last week, I received confirmation from over 100 people that they had written to their member of Assembly, urging them to vote for AB 12. Your voices were clearly heard.
From here, AB 12 moves with bipartisan support into the State Senate, where it will next be heard in the Senate Human Services Committee and if passed, onto the Senate Appropriations Committee. If our efforts are successful, it will then move onto Governor Schwarzenegger for his signature.
Thank you again for your deep commitment to children and youth in California’s foster care system.
Posted in Featured Content, State Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged AB 12, assembly, budget, california, federal money, foster care
By admin on January 21, 2010
SACRAMENTO (OBSNews.com) – Sen. Gilbert Cedillo (D-Los Angeles) issued the following statement on Governor Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget for 2010-11. The Governor’s proposal included no state revenue options and drew heavily on cuts to health and human services (43% of solutions), the federal government (35% of solutions) and revenue shifts, fees or local revenue deferrals (23% of solutions).
A stipulation in the Governor’s budget would eliminate entirely the CalWORKs, IHSS, and Healthy Families programs as well as transitional housing placement for foster youth, and funding for enrollment growth at the UC and CSU systems if the federal government does not pay $6.9 billion to the state.
“Yesterday the Governor spoke of team work and the spirit of collaboration. Today he unveiled a budget which holds the most vulnerable in our state hostage for federal monies.
Posted in State Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged budget, california, calworks, cedillo, cuts, health and human services, healthy families
By admin on January 21, 2010
[from Reuters.com By Steve Gorman 1/12/10]
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The latest budget plan from California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would force 200,000 children off low-cost medical insurance, end in-home care for 350,000 infirm and elderly citizens and slash income assistance to hundreds of thousands more.
And that’s the best-case scenario under Schwarzenegger’s prescription for filling the state’s $19.9 billion deficit.
HEY comment: HEY specifically advocates for transitional age current and former foster youth, and is working with partners against these and other cuts. The depth of how many foster care and transitional age youth services is not fully expressed in this article. There are multiple cuts to foster care services, group homes, country funded social workers, and to former foster youth housing programs. However, this article helps to express the breadth of the affect of these budget cuts by showing the many populations hurt by these cuts.
[from Reuters.com By Steve Gorman 1/12/10]
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The latest budget plan from California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would force 200,000 children off low-cost medical insurance, end in-home care for 350,000 infirm and elderly citizens and slash income assistance to hundreds of thousands more.
And that’s the best-case scenario under Schwarzenegger’s prescription for filling the state’s $19.9 billion deficit.
Refusing to consider broad tax hikes, he is relying mostly on $8.5 billion in reduced expenditures including drastic cuts to health and social spending that has long made California one of the leading U.S. states in providing help to the needy.
Posted in State Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged budget, california, foster care, funding, medicaid, medicare, welfare cuts
By admin on January 21, 2010
[from the University of California Berkeley, UCB-CWS/CMS UPDATES -- 1/11/2010]
Updates have been made for the Child Welfare Services Content Management System that is sponsored by the University of California Berkeley. Researchers at UCB collect all the data that is entered by Child Welfare Workers across the state of California and enter it into a content management system. The information is publicly available, so anyone can pull up data sets, cross reference data, and compare information about many different features of foster youth. For instance, you can learn about how many foster youth are in your country, their ages and what percentages of them are in different types of placements.
Anyone can visit the website at http://cssr.berkeley.edu/ucb_childwelfare/
Our CWS outcomes spreadsheets and the Composite Viewer have now been updated with data from the Quarter 2, 2009 extract from CWS/CMS.
Please visit our website to examine updated analyses, and to download a copy of your county’s quarterly CWS outcomes spreadsheet.
http://cssr.berkeley.edu/ucb_childwelfare/
Posted in Foster Care Library | Tagged bay area, california, csw/cms, cws, data, foster care, foster care data
By Dana Mandolesi on January 19, 2010
[from The New York Times, January 15th, 2010, By GERRY SHIH]
In the summer of 2008, a 13-year-old boy from San Francisco emerged from a government van and scanned his new surroundings. Five handsome houses, a small school and an old gymnasium stood on 11 rural acres in the Central Valley that bordered an almond orchard.
Beyond the last house was a soothing panorama of unbounded farmland, interrupted only by old Highway 99 and the big rigs that rumbled across the horizon.
For more than two decades, this has been the setting that greeted more than 2,400 wards of the state as they arrive at the Excell Center ranch, a group home for foster boys with histories of violence or mental disabilities. It is situated just outside Turlock, 40 miles southeast of Stockton.
That the Excell Center, which now houses 52 youths from ages 10 to 18, has survived the die-off of foster homes is partly a matter of real-estate economics: it costs less to house people in the heart of the Central Valley than it does in urban areas, and it costs less to pay workers to take care of them.
The other underlying economic reality, recently confirmed by a panel of federal judges, is that for 18 years, the state’s reimbursement for foster care has fallen woefully short of its minimum goals. The combination of the two means foster care in the Bay Area has been hit harder than anywhere else in the state.
In a tale all too familiar in cash-strapped California, the foster care system has been coming apart from inadequate state financing for at least 20 years, officials at the county level say. In the past two months, a succession of key court decisions in favor of care providers lifted hopes that the judicial rulings might finally turn things around, but the lawsuits have simultaneously shed light on a system that has been cut to the bone.
Visit heysf.org to read the full article
Posted in State Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged berkeley, budget, california, child welfare, foster care, san francisco
By Dana Mandolesi on December 16, 2009
[from Kidsdata.org]
Is the overall health and well-being of California’s children improving or deteriorating? How has their status changed since the 1990s? And how might the recent economic downturn affect the future of the state’s children?
To help answer these questions, the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health today released the first-ever “California Index of Child and Youth Well Being.” The index, which is based on data from kidsdata.org, shows a consistent pattern of improvement in how children have fared over the last decade, but warns that the present economic recession could undermine and possibly even reverse those gains. View the Summary>>
Key Results:
- Child well-being from 1995 to 2006 improved by about 16% for children in California. Results also are available for the state’s two major population centers (the Bay Area and Los Angeles County), both of which also registered gains in child well-being. Read more>>
- Child well-being also improved for all racial/ethnic groups that could be examined by available data (African American, Asian, Caucasian, and Latino). However, racial/ethnic disparities persisted over time. African American children, in particular, consistently fared worse than their Caucasians peers during the period studied. Read more>>
- Estimates show that poverty may rise from 18.5% of California’s children in 2008 to 27% in 2010, before falling to 24% in 2012, meaning the impact of the current economic recession likely will be long-lasting for California’s children. Read more>>
The Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health commissioned Kenneth Land, Ph.D., of Duke University to create the California Index of Child and Youth Well-Being. The composite index is modeled after Dr. Land’s national Child and Youth Well-Being Index. Kidsdata.org promotes the health and well-being of children by making data free and easily accessible to policy-makers, service providers, grantseekers, media, parents, and others who influence kids’ lives. This fall, kidsdata.org expanded to offer children’s health data for all counties, cities, and school districts in California – nearly 1,600 regions in all.
Posted in Foster Care Library, State Foster Care Policy Updates | Tagged california, economic effects on heatlh, health, lucile packard, youth
By admin on December 3, 2009
The Child Welfare System Content Management System (CWS/CMS) has added a new Key Outcomes Presentation Tool to the website.
The Key Outcomes Presentation Tool is an Excel file that displays key measures and reports for California or individual counties. Users can control the interval displayed for the state/counties they have selected.
In some sections users are able to set the span for percent change calculations.
For now, this file will be updated every other quarter. Feedback and suggestions are welcomed.
Please visit:
http://cssr.berkeley.edu/ucb_childwelfare/Ccfsr.aspx
or
http://cssr.berkeley.edu/ucb_childwelfare/
Posted in Foster Care Library | Tagged awesome, california, child welfare data, university of california
