Research and Resources

In Los Angeles County, a unique philanthropic arrangement helped a group of local nonprofits build one of the country’s only specialized curriculum designed to help foster youth gain a solid foothold in the workforce.

Last week Kaiser Permanente announced it would invest $2.75 million in research to mitigate the effects of adverse childhood experiences. Kaiser Permanente conducted the original study with the Centers for Disease Control and those findings were published in 1998 linking childhood trauma and poor health outcomes later in life dubbed adverse childhood experiences, commonly referred to as ACEs.

Newly released data compiled and analyzed by The Imprint suggests that the United States is on the downside of its most recent foster care surge. For most of the 2010s, federal data showed the number of children in foster care steadily increasing after a previous decade of decline.

There is much work left to do, but the number of states that fail to legally support children in child welfare cases has significantly declined in the past decade. These are the findings of the fourth iteration of A Child’s Right to Counsel, the periodic national report card on counsel for children published in partnership with the First Star Institute and the Children’s Advocacy Institute (CAI).

Legislators, caregivers and the media increasingly recognize that childhood adversity poses risks to individual health and well-being. The original Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Study has helped raise public awareness about this critical public health issue.

The overlap between domestic violence and child maltreatment is profound. Research suggests that crossover may include between 30 and 60 percent of families involved with the child welfare system. However, when the media writes about child welfare — the system that is charged with taking care of abused and neglected children — that connection is seldom featured in stories, according to a new study from the Berkeley Media Studies Group.

A new report from the Urban Institute offers guidance for local jurisdictions on how to repurpose juvenile facilities, as well as how to “capture and redirect” savings from reduced reliance on incarceration, while maximizing state and federal funding streams to create a “continuum of care” for youth and families in their own communities.

The argument for a greater guarantee of lawyers in dependency court has strong grounding in legal circles. It is virtually inarguable that the interests of justice are better served with counsel than without it.

As a growing number of states pass laws permitting discrimination against LGBTQ people interested in foster care and adoption, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Foundation has released a toolkit to help the child welfare field better serve LGBTQ families.