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 500,000 children are in the foster care system, most placed temporarily as a result of parental abuse or neglect. An estimated 20,000 of these children will be released at age 18 or older without a lasting family connection and at risk for considerable hardships later on. These youth are disproportionately young women and men of color, even though abuse and neglect occur at the same rate in all racial or ethnic groups.
By making grants and providing direct services, the Casey Foundation is working to address the challenges in the child welfare system and ensure that all children, regardless of age, race, culture, national origin, special need or complex circumstances, have a lifelong connection to a caring, supportive family.
Through our investments, we aim to achieve the following results:
- decreasing the number and rate of children entering foster care;
- increasing the rate and number of children connected to stable and permanent families;
- ensuring more children have their emotional and physical needs met; and
- reducing inappropriate disparities related to race, gender, age, and ethnicity in the child welfare system.
Casey Funding in Action
- Casey Family Services is a fully licensed and accredited non-profit child welfare agency providing a broad range of programs to meet the changing needs of vulnerable children and families. Programs operate throughout New England and in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1976 solely as a source for long-term foster care, Casey Family Services today offers foster care for children, as well as post-adoption, preservation and reunification services for families. In addition, Casey has established a number of specialized and innovative community-based programs to help strengthen families and enable parents to provide the healthy, nurturing environments their children need to grow and thrive.
- The Foundation developed its reform initiative, Family to Family, in 1992, based on the belief that with the right changes and improvements in policies, resources, and programs, family foster care can respond to the challenges of out-of-home placement and be a less expensive and more humane choice for children and youth than institutions or settings such as group homes. Family to Family incorporates a set of strategies designed to allow more children to remain safely in their own families or to be connected to permanent and stable families.
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The Casey Foundation and Casey Family Programs founded the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative to promote efforts helping former foster care kids with education, employment, health care, housing, and more importantly, linking them to supportive, permanent connections with caring adults. The youth themselves are involved in Initiative decision-making and creating opportunities to help others.
For many years, through our Family to Family initiative and through Casey Family Services, the Foundation has promoted collaborative approaches to achieve lifelong family connections. We have worked closely with families, child welfare agencies, courts and community partners to address the many challenges of providing quality foster care and timely permanency services.
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.
Learn More
Find resources on child welfare and permanence in the Casey Foundation Knowledge Center.