The CAFO Summit 2026 is a major annual gathering hosted by the Christian Alliance for Orphans (CAFO), scheduled for September 23–25, 2026 at First Baptist Atlanta in Georgia.

Date: April 28-30, 2026

Location: Kansas City, KS

This article reports on a lawsuit and family’s account that a 3‑year‑old immigrant girl was allegedly sexually abused while in U.S. federal custody after she was separated from her mother at the U.S.–Mexico border and placed in a foster home.

This Guardian article reports on a new investigation finding that, under recent U.S. immigration policies, some parents are being deported without their children—often without being given the opportunity to make arrangements for their care. Based on interviews with deported families and advocacy organizations, it highlights how these separations can happen abruptly during detention, leaving children—including very young or vulnerable ones—behind in precarious situations.

This comprehensive child welfare resource provides U.S. state and national data on child maltreatment, foster care, kinship caregiving, permanency, and older youth in care. The data are essential to help policymakers understand how many children and youth come in contact with the child welfare system, and why.

This report contains the findings from a nationally representative study conducted in 2025 by Barna Group of U.S. Christians to better understand U.S. Christian beliefs around and support for orphanages, children’s homes and other forms of residential care for children.

This review examines research on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected older youth with foster care experience in the United States, finding that most studies were descriptive and highlighted major disruptions in areas like housing, education, employment, mental health, and relationships. It shows that certain groups—such as youth of color, LGBTQ youth, and females—were especially impacted, and calls for stronger support systems and policies to better protect foster youth in future crises.

This article describes how a new bipartisan U.S. congressional report finds that children with mental health needs are often incarcerated in juvenile detention centers across the country—sometimes without having committed any crime—because community-based mental health care and placement options are severely limited or unavailable.

This study compares the role of advocacy coalitions in forming child protection policies in the United States and Indonesia, looking at the problems that arise from their different political and governance systems. The findings show how important it is to improve inter-agency collaboration, strengthen local governance, and get more political support to fix the problems with child protection services

This study examined the relationship between disability type and service receipt among U.S. transition-age youth aging out of foster care, a population in which 53% have a diagnosed disability, across all U.S. states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico.