Honoring Emancipated Youth (HEY)data

Beyond Emancipation: Updated Edition of Resource Guide for Youth in Transition Available

Justin Slaughter — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:22:22 +0000

[From Beyond Emancipation, July 28, 2010]

The Summer/Fall 2010 Edition of Beyond Emancipation’s Resources for Youth In Transition is available now. This booklet provides information on where Alameda County youth can get help with a variety of issues. Download your copy here.

Annie E. Casey Foundation Releases 2010 KIDS COUNT Data Book

Justin Slaughter — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:08:02 +0000

[From Philanthropy News Digest, July 27, 2010]

Overall improvements in child well-being that began in the late 1990s stalled in the years leading up to the current economic downturn, a new report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation finds.

This year’s KIDS COUNT Data Book (60 pages, PDF) found that the 2008 child poverty rate topped 18 percent, which means the number of children living in poverty grew by a million between 2000 and 2008. Moreover, when more up-to-date Census data is released later this year, the child poverty rate is expected to climb past 20 percent. The report also found that child well-being worsened in three areas — the percentage of low-birth-weight babies born, the percentage of children living in single-parent families, and the child poverty rate — and that it improved in five areas, namely infant mortality, child deaths, teen deaths, teen births, and the percentage of teens not in school and not high school graduates.

Looking across all child well-being indicators, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Vermont ranked at the top of the list among the fifty states, while Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi ranked at the bottom. The states recording the biggest improvement in their rankings between 2000 and 2007 (health data) and 2000 and 2008 (economic data) were New York, Maryland, North Carolina, Illinois, Oregon, and Wyoming. The states with the biggest drop in their rankings were Montana, South Dakota, Maine, Alaska, and Hawaii.

Based on the report’s findings, the Casey Foundation recommends that the federal government take steps to improve the collection of data on the nation’s children, including enhancing the National Survey of Children’s Health, which was last conducted in 2007 and is not scheduled again until 2011; adopting a supplemental poverty measure that captures non-cash benefits such as food stamps and child care to better understand how children are faring; increasing the sample size of the American Community Survey to include urban neighborhoods and sparsely populated rural communities; and addressing problems within the Vital Statistics System, which over the past few years have resulted in significant gaps and delays in compiling key data on health.

Subscribe to the California Dependency Online Guide

Justin Slaughter — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 23:23:59 +0000

The California Dependency Online Guide is a resource website for juvenile dependency attorneys, judicial officers, social workers, and other child welfare professionals. The guide is run by the Administration Office of the Courts’ Center for Families, Children & the Courts. Subscriptions are free.

To sign up for a free subscription, visit
www.courtinfo.ca.gov/dependencyonlineguide
For more information, e-mail
dependencyguide@jud.ca.gov or call 415-865-4563

Get the “insight,”a Useful Report to Track Outcomes for State’s Emancipated Youth

Justin Slaughter — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 09:45:46 +0000

The California Child Welfare Co-Investment Partnership publishes data for the education, employment, housing, and permancy outcomes of California’s foster youth after they emancipated from the system for policymakers The publication, called insights, also compares the data to the outcome standards set by the National Child Welfare Standards.

Intended for stakeholders, this issue examines how to interpret and use data to improve critical outcomes for children in care The report also includes policy implications for the outcomes of youth aging out of California’s foster care system. Read full report. Intended for stakeholders, this issue examines how to interpret and use data to improve critical outcomes for children in care.

Emancipation Research Project now Available at HEYsf.org

Dana Mandolesi — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 19:37:25 +0000

HEY is pleased to announce that the Emancipation Research Project, 2007-2009 Compilation of Findings: A collection of best practices and recommendations for change from research about aging out of foster care in San Francisco, is released and ready for download at www.heysf.org. During the last two years, HEY conducted The Emancipation Research Project (ERP) to examine the transition process from foster care to independence in San Francisco County.

The Emancipation Research Project consisted of 27 in-depth interviews and more than 20 informal conversations and group discussions held in 2008-2009 with professionals and youth involved in the county’s dependency system. These professionals included current and former foster youth, advocates, policy makers, managers, line staff and others. This report is a collection of the twelve “HEY Trends” and “HEY Tools” that have resulted from the data analysis. HEY Trends are short informative articles; they are in-depth and meant for people working in child welfare at all levels. HEY Tools are quick reference sheets with simple definitions and other information meant for direct line staff and those working with youth. This research is useful for redesigning programs according to best practices, when writing grants and when advocating for better outcomes for youth.

With the Emancipation Research Project, HEY seeks to guide practice with research – so the way the community serves youth is based on best practices. This is the purpose of each of these articles and tools found in the compilation. The recommendations are meant to be real-world and easily implementable improvements to how the community serves youth.

We are reaching out to you today to let you know about this important research – but also to ask you to support these recommendations. Throughout the compilation, HEY makes suggestions for improved practice, and some ideas are simple enough that they can be integrated into our everyday work without major policy change. We know some other suggestions will take more effort, but we hope that in the spirit of collaboration, we can work together to improve the lives of youth aging out of foster care.

New Foster Youth Employment Statistics from HEY!

Dana Mandolesi — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:12:31 +0000

HEY has released 4 new HEY Statistics focusing on foster youth and unemployment. The 4 HEY Statistics paint a picture of the barriers foster youth face while searching for and keeping employment. They express the current services available to them to assist them to find employment, and provide best practices for youth serving agencies. The HEY Statistics also focus on how to best track foster youth data, how organizations can better serve foster youth in employment programs, and the value of tracking foster youth data in their programs.

Check out the HEY Statistics:

New Resource: Online Clearinghouse for State Child Welfare Policies

Dana Mandolesi — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 07:13:40 +0000

New Online Clearinghouse for State Child Welfare Policies Child Trends, with support from Casey Family Programs, launches the State Child Welfare Policy Database to provide information on child welfare laws, procedures, and agency guidance for all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The Database can help elected officials, administrators, advocates, practitioners, researchers, and other stakeholders keep up to date with the policies that protect our nation's most vulnerable children. The site can be navigated by state or by topic. You can learn about your state's expenditures on child welfare services, policies for relatives and "kin" caring for children involved in the child welfare system, benefits and services provided to foster youth after age 18, and much more. In addition to the traditional web version, the site is designed to be compatible with your mobile device, allowing for easily accessible information on the go. For more information about child welfare resources available at Child Trends, please visit: www.childtrends.org/childwelfare. Through program evaluations, data analysis, policy surveys, literature reviews, and research syntheses, we seek to inform policy makers and frontline practice. Related posts:

San Francisco’s System Improvement Plan 2010 for Child Welfare Services

Dana Mandolesi — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:52:18 +0000

[from Dana Mandolesi, HEY Project Manager]

As part of the requirements to receive federal funding for foster care and supportive services for families, Child Welfare Services (CWS) must complete a tri-annual System Improvement Plan (SIP). The SIP consists of a multi-tiered review and analysis of current practices and a commitment to implementing new evidence based practices and phasing out older initiatives that do not have proven successes in serving foster youth and their families.

As part of HEY’s work to help connect and convene systems, I attend the Core Team Meetings for the SIP. The Core Team is made mostly of people that work for CWS, but community partners, contracted agencies and other concerned community members are invited to attend. At today’s meeting, the Team focused on one specific issue that San Francisco needs to improve: timeliness to adoption and concurrent planning.

When trying to improve ‘Timeliness to Adoption’, CWS means they are trying to reduce how long a youth is in foster care before they are adopted. This is a difficult statistic, because San Francisco, like most places, primarily is interested in reunifying youth with their own parents – letting them go home. However, for some youth, reunification is not an option, and adoption is the second best choice. The problem arises when CWS focuses all their energy of reunifying a youth with their parents – but that reunification doesn’t work out. The youth is left in some type of foster care for all that time, and then the process has to start over to find a suitable adoptive family.

As a response to this problem, CWS wants to improve ‘concurrent planning’. Concurrent planning means planning for two case scenarios at the same time: possible reunification and possible adoption. This way if the youth cannot reunify with their parents, they can immediately transfer their focus to the already developed adoptive plan – and the youth can leave foster care much quicker.

During the Team meeting today, CWS talked about developing milestones to implementing many initiatives to support concurrent planning and successful reunifications. First, every program and initiative needs to have good and better data reporting, so the results are recorded appropriately. Second, San Francisco does have some programs that have shown to reduce time in foster care, and those need to be systematized and supported throughout all cases and workers in CWS. Third, initiatives and practices that have evidence to support their usefulness or success rates should be discontinued and replaced with practices that have been proven to improve outcomes for adoption and reunification.

Today, the Core Team talked about multiple existing initiatives that work to improve timeliness to adoption, and new evidence practices they are considering implementing. Among some current promising and successful strategies were:

A program to recruit and train potential foster and adoptive families through the San Francisco Unified School District
The development of materials and brochures about services for families pre- and post-adoption
Training foster parents to be mentors for biological parents
Reducing reassignment of Child Welfare Workers

Among some new programs that have proven success records in other places were:

Implementing Foster Parent College
The KEEP (Keeping Foster and Kin Parents Supported and Trained) Program
Neighbor to Neighbor

The Core Team meets again in 2 weeks, and the topic will be ‘Reentries into Foster Care’. Stay tuned for an update.

By the way, we got these great pictures for free from freefoto.com

Foster Care and Child Welfare Data Added to Kidsdata.org

admin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:29:13 +0000

[from Kidsdata Monthly, Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health 1/26/09]

Just Added to Kidsdata.org: Child Safety Data for All 58 California Counties

Kidsdata.org’s statewide expansion continues this week with the addition offoster care,child abuse, anddomestic violence data — 25 indicators in all – for all counties across California. Data on many other topics will be phased in over the next several months . Coming up next: Data from the California Healthy Kids Survey and data on children with disabilities.

Highlights from These New Data:

Child Abuse
Find local data, including breakdowns by type of abuse, age, and race/ethnicity
See a summary of how children are faring in California Foster Care
Find local data, from length of time in foster care to placement distances
Domestic Violence: Find domestic violence rates and numbers for counties across California
Help Spread the Word About Kidsdata.org as a free, public service, that we hope it will benefit everyone who works on behalf of children in California. To help others in your community learn about this valuable resource, you can forward this note to your colleagues and friends.
Stay Up to Date on How Children Are Faring in Your Community.

The United Way hosts “Struggling to Make Ends Meet in the Bay Area”

admin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:26:58 +0000

The United Way of the Bay Area invites community members to a panel discussion on creating pathways out of poverty for the more than 440,000 Bay Area families who are struggling to make ends meet, according to United Way’s recently released “Struggling to Make Ends Meet in the Bay Area.”

We’ll be discussing the implications of the report and cross-sector solutions that are having measurable long-term results with a panel of experts in education, workforce and economic development.

Where: Commonwealth Club of California, 595 Market Street, 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105

Driving Directions

When: February 09, 2010, 8:30 AM to 11:00 AM

Breakfast will be served.

Add to my calendar

For more information about this event visit our webpage. Please contact Kathy Mooney at events@uwba.org if you have any questions about the event or how to register.