The Casey Foundation's Investment in Child Welfare/Permanence
All children need a safe, nurturing family to protect and guide them, but not all children in our nation have this support. More than 460,000 children are in the foster care system, most placed temporarily as a result of parental abuse or neglect. An estimated 30,000 of these children will leave care without a lasting family connection and at be at risk for considerable hardships throughout adulthood. These youth are disproportionately young women and men of color.
By making grants, providing direct services to children and families, and partnering with public systems on reform efforts, the Casey Foundation is supporting communities in ensuring that all children, regardless of circumstance, achieve the best outcomes possible and have lifelong connections to a caring, nurturing family.
Through its investments, Casey aims to achieve the following results:
- decreasing the number and rate of children entering foster care;
- increasing the number of children in foster care placed in family settings rather than congregate care;
- increasing the rate and number of children connected to stable and permanent families;
- increasing the number of children who have their emotional and physical needs met;
- reducing inappropriate disparities related to race, gender, age, and ethnicity in the child welfare system; and
- increasing the number of child welfare systems that adopt next-generation technology and data systems to support more effective services and systems reforms.
Casey Funding in Action
- Casey Family Services, the direct service agency of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, offers permanency-focused and family-strengthening services for vulnerable children and families throughout New England and in Baltimore, Maryland.
- In 2010, Casey centralized the Foundation’s technical assistance, training, and management consultant expertise to form the Child Welfare Strategy Group (CWSG). CWSG brings together the Casey Center for Effective Child Welfare Practice, the Family to Family Initiative, and the Casey Strategic Consulting Group. CWSG uses an intensive, embedded consulting model, closely collaborating with clients to spark significant, measurable transformations in public child welfare systems.
- With funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative promotes efforts to help former foster care kids with education, employment, health care, housing, and more importantly, linking them to supportive, permanent connections with caring adults. The Foundation founded the Initiative in 2001 with Casey Family Programs.
Casey’s approach to child welfare exemplifies the Foundation’s basic belief that children do better when their families are strong, and families do better when they live in communities that help them to succeed. To help achieve these goals, the Foundation focuses on improving the outcomes for children living in the most fragile families and their parents or caregivers.
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