Taking children into your home, nurturing and loving them with the goal of one day supporting their transition back to their biological parents is selfless work. Emergency foster parents Summer Conway and Renee Tedford are true foster care heroes, providing a loving home for seven children and reuniting them with their biological families. They’ll also be the first to tell you that foster parents count on the close support of nonprofits like ours, Seneca Family of Agencies, to help kids in their care succeed.
But California’s vital network of Foster Family Agencies is shrinking. These licensed nonprofit, community-based organizations recruit and approve foster parents and provide social work services to the children in their care, who are disproportionately children of color. Without urgently needed state support this year, vulnerable foster youth will fall through the cracks.
The ability of these groups to recruit, train and support foster parents provides the best chance for success for children who have experienced trauma, abuse or neglect. When Summer and Renee wanted to expand their family, a friend encouraged them to contact Seneca, one of a network of agencies that support nearly 9,000 children placed in home care in California.
With Seneca’s training and support, the couple cared for a two-year-old boy. Then they were called to take in three siblings: an 18-month-old and six-month-old twins. They later opened their home to baby triplet girls, whom they kept for over 10 months.
Summer is upfront about the challenges of caring for children experiencing upheaval and uncertainty, sometimes with just a few hours’ notice. After bonding with loving and resilient children, it can be emotionally draining to support their transition back to their biological parents. The couple felt this acutely with the triplets, whom they had hoped to adopt. But their sadness was tempered by the joy of seeing the girls’ birth mother grow and experience success. Now Summer and Renee host the girls once a week and are in regular contact with their mom.
Summer and Renee’s story is unique, but it also illustrates the close partnership between foster families and agencies like Seneca that support foster care placement.
Ensuring the children in their care are safe, loved and provided for while away from their birth families is a 24-hour-a-day job that requires a tremendous emotional investment from foster families and the caring teams of professionals who support them. Foster family agencies like Seneca employ social workers, counselors, nursing staff and peer partners with lived experience who are on call night and day. They help families through rough transitions, coach parents to provide medically required care and behavioral interventions and support youth with unique physical, emotional or educational needs.
To ensure every California foster child has a loving home, whether for weeks, months or years, California must do more to recruit, train and support parents like Summer and Renee. Instead, California is leaving children at risk by failing to adequately support FFAs.
Foster Family Agencies receive $1,432 per child per month to provide social work services and support to youth in their care. This is separate from the funding that goes directly to the foster parents. However, funding for these agencies has stalled over two decades. Unlike other parts of the child welfare system, FFAs do not receive a cost-of-living adjustment each year to address increasing administrative costs. For example, social worker rates, which come out of the monthly $1,432 per child rate, are $440 a month. If they had been adjusted each year since 2000, they would be $666.
But while rates remain inadequate, the cost of living keeps soaring. Paying highly trained social workers and staff enough to afford to live in California is challenging. It is becoming increasingly difficult for nonprofits to compete with better-funded public and private employers. Studies have shown that children who pair with one social worker while in care have a nearly 75% rate of achieving a permanent place to call home. But that rate drops to less than 3% for children with three or more social workers. Keeping turnover rates low is critical to our success.
These stagnating rates are highly counterproductive as California has committed to moving more children out of group homes and into foster family homes. The state gave foster agencies a small lifeline with a temporary rate increase that expires in June. When that money runs out this summer, rates will fall again while costs continue to increase. That will leave too many foster youth languishing in hotels, child welfare offices and juvenile halls. Each day, an estimated 300 youth across California are in unlicensed or inappropriate settings, waiting to transition to supportive, family-based care.
A recent survey of foster family agencies found that nearly 67% are currently closing facilities and losing staff due to a lack of funding, further limiting how many youth can be served.
We urge the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom to prioritize funding for foster children in the upcoming budget negotiations to ensure that foster youth and the agencies that serve them can continue their life-saving work.
Leticia Galyean is the chief executive officer of Seneca Family of Agencies, a nonprofit agency dedicated to providing unconditional care to youth and their families throughout California and Washington state. Shelby Howard is the executive director of resource ramily programs at Seneca.