Tag Archives: stability

Engaging Families: Field Guide to Making Home Visits Matter

This field guide, intended for social workers, discusses strategies for engaging families during visits. It begins by urging social workers to use a solution focused approach and identifies core conditions for developing a relationship with families, including demonstrating genuineness, empathy, respect, and competence. A practice wheel is presented that describes strategies for engaging, teaming, assessing, planning, intervening, and tracking and adjusting. Steps are then discussed for working with resistance and developing a working agreement, and tasks that a worker or support person can do to assist families through each stage of the process of change are also reviewed. Following sections of the guide address: skills for engaging families, including strategies for eliciting solutions, interviewing techniques to promote exploration, and solution-focused questions; the cycle of need and possible need statements; outcome indicators for safety, stability, well-being, and permanency; and safety and stability considerations. Link to Field Guide

Education Stability Guidance – New York

The purpose of this guidance document is to provide information to child welfare staff of local departments of social services and voluntary agencies, local educational agencies and the judiciary about requirements related to the educational stability of foster children. Congress enacted the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008. That legislation was designed to improve educational stability. The educational stability provisions were amended by the Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act in October 2011. This guidance provides information about the significance of educational stability in the life of a foster child; detail the specific statutory requirements pertaining to educational stability; and address recommended implementation strategies for the child welfare agency, school district, and the court.  Link to Guidance Memo