About Family Finding

Family Finding practice seeks to build or maintain the youth’s Lifetime Family Support network for all disconnected youth or at risk of disconnection through placement outside their home and community. The process identifies relatives and other supportive adults, estranged from or unknown to the child, especially those willing to become permanent connections for them. Upon completing the process, youth have a range of commitments from adults who can provide permanency, sustainable relationships within a kinship system, and support in the transition to adulthood and beyond. With safety at the forefront and a family-driven process, families are empowered to formulate highly realistic and sustainable plans to meet the long-term needs of children and youth. Child outcomes may include increased reunification rates, improved well-being and placement stability, transition out of the child welfare system, decreased re-entry rates, and a more robust sense of belonging for children.

Goals

  • Support foster youth in developing meaningful and enduring connections with adults who will support them across their lifespan.

  • Ensure safe and stable family-based living arrangements for all youth with dependency needs. For youth in out-of-home care due to protection needs, ensure a timely and permanent exit from the formal service system by developing a resilient and comprehensive network of supportive adults.

  • Support youth in developing a healthy sense of identity and regaining dignity, as well as providing family members with the opportunity to meet the needs within their family system. Enable young adults emerging from care to live safely and productively within their communities.

  • For individuals with lifetime care needs, increase connectedness, decrease dependence on the formal service system, and enhance family-driven decision-making.

  • For all individuals, prevent recidivism within or between formal service systems, including prevention of youth “graduation” into the adult correctional system.

Practice Components

  • Family Finding views meaningful, supportive, permanent relationships with loving adults as an essential need closely tied to youth safety. Family Finding asks practitioners to urgently pursue these relationships for lonely youth by assertively engaging family and vigorously challenging the structural barriers to developing or strengthening these relationships.

  • Although physical, legal permanence is an explicit outcome for most cases, Family Finding defines permanency as a state of permanent belonging, which includes knowledge of personal history and identity, as well as a range of involved and supportive adults rather than just one legal resource.

  • Family Finding employs effective and immediate techniques first to identify relatives or other meaningful connections for each youth. We create large groups to form a smaller, tight-knit, unconditionally committed relational permanency around young people.

  • Family Finding recognizes that families are disempowered by the placement of relative children outside of the family system, and it seeks to remediate that harm by identifying the strengths and assets of each family member and facilitating processes through which families can support their relative children effectively.

  • The Family Finding process will result in not just one plan for legal permanency but multiple plans that are each able to meet the needs of disconnected youth. No fewer than three plans are developed and evaluated by family members to ensure that they are realistic, sustainable, and safe.

  • Family Finding begins with careful preparation and alignment of current team members to pursue the six steps of the Family Finding model. While it is a strongly values-based model, it also has clear and definable goals and activities that are easily tracked with a fidelity tool. The six steps include:

    • Discovery

    • Engagement

    • Planning

    • Decision-Making

    • Evaluation

    • Follow Up