This National Foster Care Month (NFCM) event explores how agencies can partner with young people in the foster care system to build strong, supportive networks and achieve relational permanency.

Identify data sources to explore your state’s system of foster and adoptive parent licensing, recruitment, and retention.

​Learn from people with lived experience about the impact of kinship care on children in the child welfare system.

Learn how Anntesha’s experience as a child living with her grandparents and later in foster care influenced her to become a relative caregiver to her niece and nephew and work as a kinship navigator. 

Learn about Dezzie’s experience bonding with her newborn while embracing parenting classes and other agency supports in her journey to be reunified with her daughter.

Learn about Catherine’s journey recovering from trauma and addiction to be successfully reunified with her daughter.

Learn how to support state planning and implementation of the reasonable and prudent parent standard (RPPS), which is required by the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act (P.L. 113–183), to help children and youth in foster care experience normal childhood and adolescent activities. 

Explore the key components of engaging youth and families in individual permanency planning.

Support agency staff in the authentic engagement of youth and families in individual permanency planning processes.

The journeys of children, youth, and families in child welfare are seldom a straight line. Typically, there are highs and lows and winding paths in between

Get ideas for working with community foundations, endowments, and charitable trusts to improve outcomes for children and youth.

Learn how leveraging NGO connections in the community can help child welfare systems be more flexible and adaptable in achieving program goals.

See strategies and examples for partnering with faith-based communities and leaders on behalf of children and youth in foster care waiting to be adopted.

This “Service Array Data Inventory Sample Worksheet” (Worksheet) is a companion tool to A Data-Driven Approach to Service Array Guide developed by the Capacity Building Center for States. To use the Worksheet, you can print it out and fill in the blank squares, or use the questions as a guide.

This guide is designed to support administrative leaders in states and other jurisdictions in using data to assess and identify ways to improve their service array.