This bulletin outlines the importance of disaster planning in child welfare and discusses how caseworkers, with the help of their supervisors, can prepare themselves and the children, youth, and families on their caseloads for emergencies. It also provides direction for child welfare staff on response and recovery strategies they can use should disasters occur in their communities.

This report is a follow up to the ‘What Makes Life Good?’ report published in 2020 about the views of care leavers on their well-being, using pre-pandemic data collected between 2017 and 2019 through the Your Life Beyond Care survey. In this follow-up report, the authors compare the ‘What Makes Life Good?’ pre-pandemic data from 1,804 care leavers to data from 2,476 care leavers in 2020 to 2021, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This has allowed them to identify priority areas that have emerged recently. Care leavers aged 16 to 25 were asked the same questions at both time points; about their living arrangements and safety, financial well-being, relationship with care workers, emotional support, stress, loneliness, overall well-being, and more.

Findings of this report suggest that early screenings for trauma and behavioral health needs may provide important information that could be used to identify children's needs, make appropriate service referrals, establish well-matched placements, and support resource parents and birth parents toward better permanency outcomes.

Family engagement is a critical component of child welfare practice. The present study analyzes publicly available data to document U.S. state efforts to engage families.

This report contains the findings from a nationally representative study conducted 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. It includes data on the amount of funding given to residential care, as well as visits and short-term missions to orphanages.

Providing effective mental health services to unaccompanied children released from federal immigration custody is both critically important and incredibly challenging. Developed by children’s rights attorneys and mental health experts on trauma and immigration, this Guide is grounded in the voices and experiences of unaccompanied children.

The purpose of this study is to determine the association of face-to-face contact with biological parents and externalized behaviors, while taking into account placement instability and foster parent interactive sensitivity.

The purpose of this study is to determine the association of face-to-face contact with biological parents and externalized behaviors, while taking into account placement instability and foster parent interactive sensitivity.

The number of U.S. children orphaned during the COVID-19 pandemic may be larger than previously estimated, and the toll has been far greater among Black and Hispanic Americans, a new study suggests. More than half the children who lost a primary caregiver during the pandemic belonged to those two racial groups, which make up about 40% of the U.S. population, according to the study published 7 October, 2021 by the medical journal Pediatrics.

An estimated 2.7 million grandparents in the United States are taking the lead in raising their grandchildren. More than 6.1 million children under 18 live in their grandparents’ households. Focusing on your physical, mental and financial health is critical if you are your grandchild’s primary caregiver.