Make a plan to keep youth connected to their supportive adults

About this recommendation

Most youth enter foster care with more connections than they leave with. Often, if a connection cannot serve as a placement resource, child welfare systems will not actively work to maintain that connection.

However, supportive connections are critical to a youth’s well-being. When a formal plan is in place to maintain connections, youth will have more people that they can count on for emotional support, rides, tutoring, advice, and everyday connections. test

How to do this

As soon as the youth enters care, make a list of all the supportive connections in their lives, including family members, teachers, friends, and even pets. Work with the youth to create this list. Consider making a genogram or heart map. After that, you should:

• Locate contact information for each supportive connection. Staff may need to use social media to do so.
• Make a formal plan to stay in touch with each connection. Plans could include weekly Facetime or phone calls, exchanging letters or emails, in-person visits, providing transportation, or attending school events. You can even make a plan to stay in touch with a pet, such as visits to a dog park.
• Designate a place in your IT system to store these plans.
• Get foster families involved. Maintain a formal expectation that foster families will help support these connection plans.

Anticipated costs and benefits

Outcome data

Olmsted County, MN demonstrated significantly better outcomes for older foster youth when a ratio of 3:1 unpaid adults to paid staff attended their planning meetings (roughly 12 family members to 3 staff members). They also pay attention to the balance of family present from both sides of the family. source

Who's doing this

• A Second Chance, Inc. establishes committed relationships regarding the specific ways kin can support each young person.
• Virginia uses mobility maps with foster youth to map out important relationships.
• New Hampshire engages kin in Permanency Pacts.
• Arizona Fostering Sustainable Connections program helps children locate and reconnect with relatives, friends, coaches, neighbors, teachers, and others who have been important in their lives. Once the child’s important people are identified, a Family Engagement Specialist facilitates a meeting to identify ways that these people can become involved in the child’s life.
• Epic O'Hana in 'Hawaii uses O’Hana meetings to identify and engage extended families in a plan to help children stay safe and connected to family. Epic O’Hana’s report on Maintaining Connections explains how they engage extended families for children involved in child welfare.
• Indiana’s practice model includes developing plans for maintaining connections for foster youth.
• Wisconsin says: “The focus of Family Find and Engagement is not the discovery of placements. The focus is to discover and build connections for the youth.”
• Uplift Human Services in San Jose, CA uses a heart map to help youth identify and make plans with their supportive connections.
• Iowa policy requires that: “If you determine that a person is unwilling or unable to assume care of the child, determine if the person is willing to provide other types of support to the child to maintain their connection to family and others with whom they have a significant relationship. This type of support could include postal mail or e-mail contact, phone calls, visits, respite, and participation in holiday or other gatherings.“
• Michigan explicitly asks identified kin to commit to staying in touch with youth on their Relative Notification Form
• Michigan has a “Maintaining Contact when Placement is Not an Option” policy: Kinship connections who are not considered for placement are encouraged to maintain contact in other ways, which include but are not limited to: supervising family visitation, transporting the child to appointments, attending school programs or athletic events, and visits, phone calls, and letters.
• California State Code requires that the child welfare system make a plan for maintaining supportive connections for foster youth 10 and older.