Innovative Foster Family Recruitment & Retention
As someone selected by Foster America to serve the State of Indiana for 18 months, I had the unique opportunity to work closely with Indiana DCS Director Terry Stigdon and witness her dedication to listening and learning from people with lived experience in the child welfare system. During my time with the agency, Director Stigdon held what seemed like weekly meetings with individuals and families who had interacted with Indiana DCS, asking detailed questions and truly listening to our perspectives and experiences.
One of the key projects I worked on during my fellowship was analyzing the systems and processes in place for tracking, engaging, and converting prospective foster families. Through my research and conversations with various stakeholders, including families and older youth in care or recently exited care, I learned that there was a significant opportunity to modernize our approach to attracting, engaging, and retaining foster families. One major discovery was a lack of focus on retention as a key to recruitment. And further we were not adequately tracking in real time the experiences of our foster families, leading to frustrations piling up or even high performance going unacknowledged. We also had room for improvement in terms of collaborating and sharing and adopting best practices between agencies, including between DCS and the Licensed Child Placement Agency (LCPA) community. Additionally, a major challenge was the lack of visibility into the details of why foster families continue successfully or quit and very little dedicated resources for improving the digital infrastructure to track , analyze and respond to the needs of foster families across the state.
I am grateful for the opportunity to work on this important issue and am thrilled to see Director Stigdon’s administration make $2 million available to LCPAs to support innovative strategies for foster care recruitment and retention. This is exactly the kind of investment we need to reimagine recruitment and retention as a continuum and to develop the infrastructure to support it. I look forward to continuing to work with the foster care community to transform the way we serve vulnerable children and their families in Indiana and across the country.
