ACF Supports Resiliency and Recovery through the American Rescue Plan
March 11, 2022
President Biden’s fiscal year 2023 budget includes a robust set of proposals that will significantly increase funding and improve quality for children, youth, and families who are involved with the child welfare system. As the Associate Commissioner of the Children’s Bureau at the Administration for Children and Families, I am pleased to highlight a few of our proposals. We hope that Congress invests in children, youth, and families by passing these proposals and placing them on the President’s desk to sign.
First, the Children’s Bureau proposes to expand and encourage greater participation in child welfare programs that offer prevention services. We need innovative approaches to support evidence-based prevention services, especially those that allow for cultural adaptations of child welfare services. These services are particularly important for at-risk Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Native Americans, as well as members of other historically underserved communities that have had disproportionate involvement with the child welfare system. The Biden-Harris Administration’s plan for comprehensive prevention services would allow states, tribes, and territories to serve families in a more robust, focused, nimble, culturally adapted, and relevant manner that centers the needs of families across a wide variety of circumstances.
In President Biden’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal to Congress, the Children’s Bureau would also create new flexibilities and support for youth who experience foster care. The Chafee Program supports youth who are in, and have transitioned out of, foster care. This proposal would give jurisdictions the funding and flexibilities that they need to expand the number of youth who can participate in the program; expand the ways that child welfare agencies provide services to young people; and expand outreach and engagement efforts to particularly vulnerable young people.
The Children’s Bureau also proposes to increase financial support to kinship caregivers. These caregivers offer love, stability, and support to children in their families who cannot safely live with their parents. Research is clear that children thrive when placed with relatives: they maintain familial relationships, cultural connections, and stability in safe, loving environments. But many kinship caregivers are woefully under-supported and do not have the resources and services that they need when they assume responsibility for children or youth for whom they are caring. Our proposal, if passed, would increase financial and other supports to these families so that more children can remain and thrive in familial environments when they cannot remain safely with parents.
We also propose to incentivize placing children and youth in foster family and kinship homes instead of in congregate care settings by changing the way that agencies are reimbursed for placing children and youth into group homes and child-care institutions. Research is clear that group and congregate care settings produce the least positive outcomes for children. Incentivizing placing children and youth in family-like settings will be good for children, youth, families, and communities, as well as promote equity in the child welfare system.
The President’s budget proposes transformational changes for children, youth, and families. Let’s invest and join together so that children, youth, and families have the individualized and culturally relevant resources that they need to stay safely together, kinship caregivers have support when children cannot stay safely at home, and children and youth can be placed in more family-like settings when they cannot safely remain with parents or kinship caregivers.
