private providers

Leaders of the Senate Finance Committee introduced a bill Wednesday that would incentivize kinship placements in foster care, establish national child welfare standards on worker caseloads, and require better assessment of both child fatalities and the performance of private providers.

On Wednesday, Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) issued a report scrutinizing the management of private foster care providers, and skewering one especially notorious foster care agency.    Stirred by news stories chronicling dozens of child deaths because of management of foster care services by The MENTOR Network, a national for-profit provider, Hatch and Wyden directed the Senate Finance Committee to study the matter.

It should always be noted when an organization threaded into the fabric of American history comes to an end. So it was in October, when it was announced that the United Neighborhood Centers of America (UNCA), the courier of Jane Addams’ settlement house movement, would cease to exist for the first time since 1911.