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Young children growing up in crisis settings are vulnerable to a range of compounding risks that threaten their long-term development and wellbeing. Evidence shows that quality early childhood services for young children and their caregivers can provide a buffer against these risks and help children reach their developmental potential. Despite the growing need for investment in early childhood development in emergencies (ECDiE), no methodology currently exists to track and report on donor commitments and funding. This report aims to help fill that gap by estimating funding going to ECDiE in…
Abstract
Little information is available regarding the financial and non-financial costs of implementing and sustaining universal trauma and mental health screening in state child welfare systems. A cost analysis was conducted as part of a 5-year, federally funded statewide demonstration project to install universal trauma screening in one state’s child welfare system. The project implemented a battery of validated instruments that varied by age of the child (0–18) to measure trauma exposure, post-traumatic symptoms and child well-being. All adjudicated children and youth involved in the…
This brief from Head Start provides an overview of state funding for Head Start, a collection of comprehensive birth to five programs in the U.S. specifically designed to strengthen families, promote school readiness, and improve child health. Among other outcomes, the Head Start programs strengthen families and promote more positive parent-child relationships, more stable and healthy homes, and less child welfare involvement. The brief provides examples of how state investments in Head Start have helped to improve outcomes for at-risk children and families.
Over the past decade, policymakers and child welfare practitioners in the US increasingly recognize that youth who experience foster care need continued support past age 18. As a result, policymakers have increased funding to support young people ages 18 and older who are in and/or transitioning from foster care. Within this new funding environment, however, little is known about how funding streams come together to provide supports for this population. This report draws on interviews the authors conducted with 19 child welfare leaders in eight jurisdictions to highlight how jurisdictions are…
This statement from Lumos outlines the organization's recommendations to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development regarding the institutionalization of children. The statement includes some background information on the harmful effects of institutionalization on children and highlights the existing "commitment to ending the institutionalisation of children inside the EU." The statement includes three recommendations from Lumos:
1. Ensure that the EBRD does not fund institutions for children
2. Include children in institutions as a target group for the EBRD’s…
Introduction
Children placed in institutional care are deprived of their fundamental right to living in a family environment. The Romanian state would greatly improve their situation, if it took care of preventing the separation of children from their family, instead of focusing on the current model - placing in care about 63,000 children, while hundreds of thousands of them still live in inhumane conditions. These are the ones that specialised public authorities pretend they do not see, because they lack the capacity for legislative framework design to prevent the separation of…
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
As part of its Waiver strategy, New York City reduced caseworker caseloads within the network of private agencies that provide foster care services on behalf of New York’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), with the expectation that doing so would expedite permanency.
For the evaluation, we asked whether the rate of exit to permanency increased for children whose time in care coincided with when private agencies reached the new caseload target.
In sum, we found that exit rates increased by 9 percent in the years following implementation of the caseload…
Executive Summary
Transitional youth are young people ages 16 to 24 who leave foster care without being adopted or reunited with their biological families and/or who are involved in the juvenile justice system, where they may be in detention or subject to terms of probation. With childhoods often marked by trauma and a lack of stability, transitional youth face notoriously poor outcomes across many areas of life. Compared with their peers, they experience more interactions than average with the criminal justice system; suffer from mental health problems at higher rates; and struggle to…
Summary
This report turns the lens on young people who age out of foster care and explores four areas — education, early parenthood, homelessness and incarceration — where they fare worse than their general population peers. Readers will learn the economic cost of this shortfall and see how targeted interventions can help these youth while also erasing billions of dollars in unnecessary costs.
In This Report, You’ll Learn
- What challenges youth in foster care face compared to their general population peers.
- The economic benefit of doing more to help young people…
These recommendations have been developed by the Opening Doors for Europe’s Children campaign and are based on the work of the campaign since 2016, calling for a stronger commitment to maintain, strengthen and expand the use of EU funds for deinstitutionalisation reforms in Europe. "As a coalition of 124 civil society organisations working to improve the lives of vulnerable families and children in 16 European countries," says the report, "we call on the European Parliament and the Council of the EU to take forward the renewed commitment of the European Commission, as reflected in EC’s…