Please read on to learn about our next webinars, our latest resources, and other news from around the field. | | Register for Our Upcoming Webinars! | | |
Valuing and Supporting Kin Caregivers: A Training for Child Welfare Agencies
2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. ET
| | To support the roll out of kin-specific foster home approval standards around the country, the Network has created a training for child welfare agencies to deliver to their staff. Join us for this “train the trainers” style webinar and get the tools you need to tailor our training package – all free of charge – to your agency’s needs and to help you promote a kin-first culture. | | | |
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TANF and Kinship/Grandfamilies
1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. ET
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PLEASE NOTE NEW DATE AND TIME! | | TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) child-only grants are often the only source of ongoing financial support for children raised by grandparents and other relatives with no parents in the home. Join us to explore data for each state on TANF child-only grants, newly compiled by our partners at Child Trends. Learn how your state compares to others, along with strategies and policies that other states, tribes, and territories have used to improve kinship/grandfamilies’ access to this important support. Log off with ideas on how to improve supports to children in kinship/grandfamilies. | | | | Since we launched our LinkedIn page in September 2023, we’ve shared dozens of resources, funding opportunities, and training events. We invite you to follow our page to keep up with our latest news between monthly issues of this newsletter. | | What's New From the Network? | |
Last Chance to Apply for our Exemplary Kinship Practice Designation
Does your agency or organization have a practice that supports kinship families? Would you like your work to be recognized nationally as "Exemplary" and shared with others who can use it to help kinship families in their communities?
We're casting a wide net in our search for "practices." A practice may be kin-specific or more general and implemented in a way that helps kinship families. It might be anything from a form a school district provides to allow kin to enroll the children they are raising in school to an online, searchable database of services for kin. This opportunity complements our previous Exemplary Program initiative.
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Legal Service Models for Kin Caregivers
There are many helpful models of providing legal assistance to kin caregivers around the country. This resource, prepared in collaboration with our subject matter experts at the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law, summarizes those models and provides profiles of organizations doing good work. The goal of this piece is to provide replicable ideas to others wanting to provide supportive legal assistance to kinship families in their communities.
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We shared a new video, information about working with schools, and tips for schools in a recent LinkedIn post. Check it out here. Please comment, react, and otherwise share it! | | Individual Assistance Spotlight | | | | The Network is responding free of charge to individual technical assistance (TA) requests from professionals who work in systems and organizations that serve kinship/grandfamilies. To request assistance on the array of issues impacting kinship/grandfamilies, please complete our request assistance form. | | |
We answer questions and respond to requests of all sizes. Some questions focus on a very specific topic and/or location, while others are much broader. Below, we share an example of a TA request and response.
Request
What are some resources I can share with pediatricians who are newly learning about kinship families?
Response
We’re excited to hear you would like to share our resources with pediatricians! Below are a few that would be helpful to pediatricians and other healthcare professionals who would like to learn basic information to better serve the families.
To make an individual request, please complete this form and we will get in touch.
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This month, we’re taking a break from sharing a specific story to bring you information on the broader picture of the Network’s impact. Our new impact booklet showcases the Network’s reach and support, shares examples of our activities, and includes quotes from professionals who have received our services. The booklet also features a map (pictured below) that illustrates the Network’s services and reach across the country. |
| Presentations by the Network | | | | On Wednesday, April 23, Network Technical Assistance Specialist Kylee (Craggett) Kern will co-present “Family Caregiver Services and Supports: Resources and Program Highlights” during the American Society on Aging’s On Aging conference in Orlando. Also on Wednesday, Generations United GRAND Voices Support Coordinator Robyn Wind will be part of a panel, “Beyond Generations Summit: BIPOC Grandparents Raising Grandchildren.” | | | | On Wednesday, April 30, Network Director Ana Beltran and Network Management Committee Member and Generations United GRAND Voice Grandparent Caregiver Sarah Smalls will be presenting about kinship families to the Casey Family Programs Technical Assistance Unit during an in-person meeting in Washington, DC. | | | | Also on Wednesday, April 30, Network Technical Assistance Specialist Shalah Bottoms and Generations United GRAND Voice Mercedes Bristol will be speaking with a group of Texas pediatricians on Supporting Kinship Families. | | | | Shalah was invited to participate in a webinar on Thursday, May 8, for the County of Alameda (California) Advisory Commission on Aging. She will speak to Aging professionals and caregivers about the work of the Network. | | What's New Around the Network? | |
Join Us at the Generations United Conference
Wednesday, June 25 through Friday, June 27
Louisville, Kentucky
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| The 23rd Generations United conference, co-hosted by Harbor House, will bring together hundreds of professionals, educators, caregivers, advocates, and enthusiasts from around the world to learn, connect, and share innovative practices and programs on a range of intergenerational topics, including a pre-conference intensive and a full conference track on kinship/grandfamilies. Registration rates go up after April 30. | | |
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National Caregiver Champion Collaborative (CCC) Accepting Registration
USAging
| | USAging, one of the Network’s partner organizations, invites Aging Network providers and partners who are responsible for the administration of caregiver services and supports to register to join the National Caregiver Champion Collaborative (CCC). A broad-based affinity group, the CCC meets quarterly on Zoom and serves as a learning and peer exchange forum for caregiving managers and staff across the Aging Network and partner organizations. | |
Kinship Town Hall Series
KinCarolina
Tuesday, April 29, 9:00-10:30 a.m. ET
Wednesday, April 30, 6:00-7:30 p.m. ET
Thursday, May 1, 3:00-4:30 p.m. ET
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| The Kinship Town Hall Series consists of three free, virtual sessions for child- and family-serving professionals, kin caregivers, and other interested community members. Each of the three sessions will focus on a specific topic, and if you are a licensed social worker, counselor, or psychologist, you can earn free Continuing Education (CE) credits for participating in each one. Tuesday’s session will be “The Journey of Kinship Care,” Wednesday’s session will be “Peer Support in Action,” and Thursday’s session will be “Kinship Experiences in Research.” Although KinCarolina is currently operating only in South Carolina, participants from all over the country are invited to join the conversation at these events. | |
Child Welfare Perceptions About Achieving Legal Permanency
Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption
The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption first commissioned The Harris Poll in 2022 to survey child welfare professionals across the United States to capture their perspectives about achieving legal permanency for children waiting in foster care. In 2024, the Foundation re-administered the survey with some new questions to gain additional insights from various roles within a child’s team. This report shares the results, including the finding that over 90% of professionals in various roles in child welfare “believe that adoption by a family known to the child is the most ideal permanency outcome for children waiting in foster care.”
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Child Welfare: States’ Use of TANF and Other Major Federal Funding Sources
U.S. Government Accountability Office
This report examines states’ use of Title IV-E, Title IV-B, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds for child welfare purposes. This is the final report in a series of reports addressing states’ use of TANF funds. Page 11 of the report includes a box about TANF child-only payments and kin caregivers and indicates that another report on kinship families is forthcoming.
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Funding is a perpetual challenge for many community-based organizations and other nonprofits, and recent events and uncertainty have exacerbated this common concern. Below, we list several Network resources related to finding funding, all of which contain guidance and links to additional information.
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Creating a Family: Talk about Adoption & Foster Care podcast, March 26, 2025
This podcast episode features Network Director Ana Beltran; Gregory Jones, a grandfather raising five grandchildren; and Erica Burgess, a social worker with over 25 years of experience in child welfare, specializing in kinship care.
March 26, 2025
Under the updated policy, beginning April 14, 2025, individuals applying for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), Medicare, or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) who cannot use a personal my Social Security account can complete their claim entirely over the telephone. Individuals who cannot use their personal my Social Security account to apply for benefits will need to prove their identity at a Social Security office if applying for Retirement, Survivors, or Auxiliary (Spouse or Child) benefits.
Deseret News, April 7, 2025
Many organizations and agencies are feeling the effects of recent government changes. Children’s Service Society of Utah, which runs a Network-designated exemplary program for grandfamilies, recently lost over half of the funding that supports its home visiting program after the sudden revocation of two federal grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
National Academy for State Health Policy Blog, April 7, 2025
The National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP) is tracking the decision-making process and decisions that states are making with regard to their opioid settlement funds. This blog post shares key themes and highlights from 2024 and early 2025. Although not noted in this blog post, some states – including Alabama and Ohio – have used a portion of their opioid settlement funds to support kinship families that formed as a result of the opioid epidemic.
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Please follow the Grandfamilies & Kinship Support Network on LinkedIn here! |
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All of our previous newsletters are linked on our website, so you can access them anytime. |
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The Grandfamilies & Kinship Support Network is the first-ever national technical assistance center for those who serve grandfamilies and kinship families. It was created to help guide lasting, systemic reforms. The Network is a new way to collaborate, to work across jurisdictional and systemic boundaries, to eliminate silos, and to help one another and be helped in return. Thank you for being part of it.
We'd love to hear from you! Please send any feedback on this newsletter to mweiss@gu.org.
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The Network is supported by the Administration for Community Living (ACL), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award totaling $9,950,000 with 95 percentage funded by ACL/HHS and $523,684 and 5 percentage funded by non-government sources. The contents are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by ACL/HHS, or the U.S. Government.
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