CASA OC Plans To Help More Youth With Expanded Family Finding Efforts
By: Valerie Burchfield Rhodes
When a child is removed from their home due to neglect or abuse, they are often placed in an emergency shelter or a foster home with strangers. This results in an already traumatic experience being intensified when a child is separated from everyone and everything that is familiar to them. However there is a growing body of research that demonstrates that children do better when they remain safely connected to their own families and communities.
Research shows that children entering the child welfare system have better outcomes when placed with family members including greater placement stability and fewer emotional and behavioral problems. 72% of youth who had their first placement with a relative and are still in care a year later, are still with that relative or extended family member. By contrast, only 24% of youth placed with a non-relative who are still in care a year later, are still with that non-relative.
It is this growing body of evidence that led Governor Newsom to sign Assembly Bill 207, which allocated $150 million to support family-finding efforts which seek to connect youth in foster care with immediate or extended family. As part of this effort, the California Department of Social Services and UC Davis have partnered to launch the Center For Excellence In Family Finding and Engagement.
The goal of the program is to dive deeper into family engagement work and more quickly involve family members in the life of a child in the dependency care system. Experience has shown that locating and engaging with family at or before the time a child enters the foster care system can be more impactful for a child with the ultimate goal of placing more children with family members or other loved ones.
Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) of Orange County has been in the forefront of this work for more than a decade and was the first CASA organization in the country to develop a Family Finding program using an evidence-based model created by Kevin Campbell, an expert in the field of children’s mental health. Tara Dempster, Family Finding Manager for CASA OC, is retooling the way her department plans to help more youth remain safely connected with their families in the hopes of avoiding years in the dependency care system.
Tara explains the goals of her department, “CASA has a unique opportunity because we are court-appointed and have access to all of the documents that come in through the court. That gives us the ability to support this statewide initiative by working alongside social workers to be of support and do this family research piece earlier and faster. This will hopefully help children remain closer to family. Family is always the solution whether it be placement or just support by family members.”
Traditionally CASA OC has provided Family Finding support to youth who are already in the dependency care system, often after many years in foster care. But Tara’s hope is to develop an additional stream of CASA volunteers who will take on cases as soon as a youth is removed from their home. They will begin searching for trusted family members or friends and will make recommendations when the case goes before a judge to hopefully prevent a child from ever having to enter the dependency system in the first place.
Tara explains, “In my perfect world, we have this opportunity to search for family members at the very beginning of a case. If we could do that right at the very start, we have the opportunity to make an impact immediately. We could serve more youth and maybe some of these kids wouldn’t wind up in the system for ten or more years.”
CASA volunteers are uniquely positioned to facilitate Family Finding since they are all fully trained and represent a diverse cross section of the population. Tara says, “If we have a Vietnamese speaking case, we have a Vietnamese CASA we can call on. We can be very helpful with such a broad spectrum of volunteers. Our goal is to have all CASAs involved in supporting Family Finding in some way. It will be part of our intake checklist to determine if a child has at least three meaningful connections and if they don’t, it will trigger a referral to Family Finding to seek out such connections.”
*Mirabel is an Orange County youth who’s life was changed by CASA OC’s Family Finding team. Mirabel was eleven when she entered dependency care. She was separated from her mother and siblings when placed into foster care. She never knew her biological father and hoped to learn his identity. After DNA testing and a great deal of sleuthing by the CASA OC Family Finding team, Mirabel was finally introduced to her biological father on her 14th birthday. (Read her back story here.)
Two years later, Mirabel is finally meeting her paternal grandmother for the first time. Over a recent lunch at Red Robin, she and her newly-found grandma bonded over their shared love of the perfect fettuccine alfredo. Her grandma shared photos on her phone of many other family members, so Mirabel now knows she's part of a larger extended family.
As the Center for Excellence in Family FInding and Engagement ramps up, they’ve formed an advisory committee with members from throughout the state selected from the various stakeholders working with youth in dependency care. Jenny Leon, CASA OC Chief Program Officer, was one of 25 selected to sit on the committee. She’s been tapped, in part, to share her experience based upon the years of work of CASA OC’s own Family Finding team.
According to Jenny, “What we’ve seen is that it’s not just about placement - it’s about getting buy-in on even bringing relatives into the picture. Is the team open to that? It can be especially challenging when it’s coming late into the youth’s time within the system, and even more so if the youth is in a stable non-kin placement and has not been able to maintain contacts with their biological family.” She adds, “This is why it’s so beneficial to enhance this work on the front-end of a child’s placement in care. It could help build a network of support for the youth if they do have to come into the system, and then relatives can continue to be engaged and potentially reassessed for placement later on if still needed.”
The mechanics of this new program and how the budgets will flow downstream to local counties are still being worked out but Tara and Jenny are already developing strategies to serve more youth. Tara says, “We hope to come alongside social services and provide assistance. CASA has research tools that are unavailable to investigative social workers such as utilizing social media which provides a treasure trove of information. We can provide contact sheets with good phone numbers, good email addresses, and good physical addresses to help facilitate their outreach efforts.”
Meanwhile, back at Red Robin, Mirabel is now connected with both her biological dad and her grandmother. She has learned she is half Hispanic which Mirabel believes explains the fondness she’s always had for Spanish language music. The pieces of her family history puzzle are falling into place and she is beginning to feel like she is connected to something larger than before.
Expanding these types of connections will be the primary focus of the Center for Excellence in Family Finding and Engagement. According to Jenny Leon, “Our 2023 CASA Conference, where we gather all of our volunteer advocates for a day of fun and training, was centered around the theme of the importance of family connections.”
To learn more about how you can become a CASA or a Family Finding advocate, visit www.casaoc.org/become-a-casa
*Names/details changed to protect privacy