Family First Act

As we approach one year of living with the coronavirus pandemic, we want to hear from foster and kinship families about how the global health crisis has transformed their lives.

Our editorial team has designed a short, anonymous survey for caregivers of youth currently in foster care.

As I started to clean up the kitchen after Christmas dinner with my family, a text message appeared on my phone. The message simply read, “Merry Christmas,” with a picture attached.

As America headed into the coronavirus pandemic, the number of children who were confirmed to have been victims of abuse or neglect fell to its lowest point in a long time, perhaps more than two decades, according to the annual report released today by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF). 

In June of 2018, at the height of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” border policy separating thousands of migrant children from their parents, one presidential appointee delivered a very different message to a small group of American parents who had struggled with the foster care system: Jerry Milner, head of the U.S.

California will spend more than $8 million to find safer homes for children returning from troubled out-of-state residential programs, in response to a Chronicle and Imprint investigation into rampant reports of abuse at the facilities.

Since the birth of America’s settlement house movement, human services organizations have played a critical role in partnering with those with lived experiences to build assets in neighborhoods that strengthen communities.

Even before the pandemic struck in March, the past year has been challenging for the Department of Social Services in St. Lawrence County, a rural county just south of the Canada border.

Ten months into a deadly pandemic that continues to wreak havoc on society and the economy, a federal relief package bundled extra child welfare money to states with a new rule: You can’t let foster youth age out into adulthood during the ongoing coronavirus emergency. 

The traditional flurry of last-minute child welfare policy work from the Administration for Children and Families continued yesterday, with two memoranda on civil legal advocacy, and the lessons of and opportunities created by the coronavirus pandemic.