This sudy sought to deepen understanding of the underlying patterns of services receipt of the  John F. Chafee Foster Care Independence Program (CFCIP) to prepare for youth’s successful transition to adulthood. The authors used multi-level latent class analysis (MLCA) to identify underlying combinations of service receipt that may be influenced by youth-level and state-level characteristics.

In this piece for Youth Today, Richard Wexler - executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform - calls out child protection policies in the US for too often unnecessarily removing children from poor families due to parental mental illness and what the child protection agencies deem as inability to raise children "independently." 

BCN is seeking a Regional Coordinator for our Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Initiative on Children without Appropriate Family Care. 

This paper focuses on understanding how the key stakeholders of the foster care system work together, as well as the systems that facilitate collaboration.

The purpose of this study was to assess the perspective of social service providers who participated in a nine-month, trauma-informed care (TIC) training intervention on 1) their capacity to make referrals to trauma-specific services following the training, and 2) factors external to the training intervention that supported or hindered their ability to link traumatized youth with services.

The present study examined whether the prospective association between cumulative pre-adoptive risk (e.g., maltreatment, age at placement, foster placement instability, ever having lived with birth parent) and adolescent/young-adult substance use was mediated by childhood internalizing and externalizing problems in youth adopted from foster care.

A First Nations child welfare organization has prioritized further understanding of reunification and parenting, including identification of successes and barriers to reunification, and service needs within communities. These priorities were addressed with a community-based participatory research model and guided by a Research Advisory. 

Among older youth transitioning from the foster care system, this longitudinal study examined the association of religious and spiritual capital to substance use in the past year at age 19. 

This study sought to build on previous work that calls for the need to develop programs to support foster care alumni in higher education and to obtain a better understanding of the characteristics of existing programs and the perceived programmatic and student challenges as reported by program directors and staff, faculty, and researchers. 

This article from the Mankato Free Press of Minnesota, USA describes the benefits of a local monthly support group of grandfamilies and other kinship carers and the stories of some of the families who meet once a month to lend one another support.