This article in New York Magazine highlights a new family tracing program for children in foster care initiated by New York’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) that borrows from Family Tracing and Reunification techniques used by the International Red Cross and other humanitarian agencies for reconnecting separated children with their relatives in conflict or disaster situations. This new program called ‘family finding’ was initiated to reunite children who are in the foster care system with extended family members who in many cases did not even know the child was in foster care at all. Although the idea of having children deprived of parental care live with their extended family is not new, the article points out that children who could not be placed with close relatives tended to be sent to group homes or non-relative foster care. For the first time with this initiative, experts say, “agencies like ACS are committed to looking beyond a child’s closest relatives to identify dozens of extended family members, sometimes even mentors and teachers, who may be better able to give a child a home.
In practice, case workers essentially reconstruct a kinship road map of up to 60 extended family members in hopes of finding capable, loving relatives who will take the child in. For nearly a year now, the city has deployed it as part of a pilot program, testing the waters to see if it can be used citywide. Case workers are now spending hours interviewing children and their parents, mining them for the names of relatives who may be able to step in. Although the numbers are still small, the article points out that there are signs that this new approach could fundamentally change how New York City deals with foster children.