The best thing for a child in foster care is living with an adult they already know and trust ("kin"). The vast majority of children entering care have kin available to care for them, but most systems fail to find these adults for most children.
When systems adopt more effective kin-finding practices, they can achieve initial kinship placement rates in excess of 80%.
While the playbook has 21 recommended practices for kin-finding, this progress dashboard focuses on the Top 7. As states adopt them, we will focus the dashboard on other practices.
Our goal is for every child welfare system to adopt these 7 promising practices for Kin Finding: dedicated kin-finding responsibility, expansive legal definition of kin, use a variety of contact methods, require senior staff sign-off for non-kin placements, use social media to find kin, ask youth about their kin, and maintain a shared list of kin.
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