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Why do we need to revitalize recruitment?
Foster parents are healing agents for youth placed in care. Local social services districts and voluntary agencies direct substantial resources towards finding and keeping qualified kinship, foster and adoptive homes. Historically, recruitment has been focused on developing a pool of foster and adoptive parents who have not had previous connections to the child in their care. Now, practice and policy have evolved to prioritize placing children with kin. There continue to be unique challenges and opportunities in recruitment of relative and non-relative foster and adoptive parents, such as finding homes where siblings can be kept together, homes for older youth, and homes for children with complex physical and emotional needs.
This resource, Revitalizing Recruitment, is intended to be used by local districts and voluntary agencies to help meet their recruitment challenges.
Strategies for Recruitment
- How do we Revitalize Recruitment?
- Driving Recruitment with Data
- Kin-First Recruitment
- Targeted vs. General Recruitment
- Child-Focused Recruitment
- Hard-to-Find Homes
- Customer Service for Retention and Support
- Social Media: A New Way to Communicate
Resources
This project is funded by the Children’s Bureau, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, under a Cooperative Agreement, Grant Number 90CO-1109. The contents of this publication are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Children’s Bureau, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services or the New York State Office of Children and Family Services.
