Policy Brief – PDF
All children deserve lifelong family connections and a permanent place to call home. Children thrive when they have caring relationships with supportive adults they can turn to in times of trouble, and with whom they can celebrate positive achievements and milestones. When children are placed in out-of-home care, they need this support even more. It is the agency’s responsibility to ensure that children are able to maintain relationships with their extended family and fictive kin. If those relationships don’t exist or they have been disrupted, it is also the agency’s responsibility to build or rebuild them.
To connect children in care with relatives and fictive kin, and nurture long-term relationships in permanent families, caseworkers should implement effective search and engagement strategies before children enter care, as well as urgently and consistently following removal until they are successfully living in a permanent home. This brief discusses the core elements of effective family search and engagement and highlights a number of effective approaches.