Staying close to home

Community approach to foster children puts Denver at leading edge of reform movement

Jerd Smith, Rocky Mountain News

Published June 10, 2006 at midnight

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Denver has reduced the number of foster children in institutions by more than half since starting a program five years ago that relies on extended families and neighborhoods to care for them instead.

The program's results have landed the city at the forefront of a national movement to change the troubled foster care system.

Now, with data showing fewer children entering institutions, and fewer entering the court system, the city has expanded the pilot program to its entire child-welfare system, and Colorado is planning a statewide rollout of the approach.

The idea of the Family to Family initiative is to intervene with families early, long before they're at risk of losing their children.

If children must be removed to be kept safe, extended families are tapped as the first line of defense, followed by foster families in the child's neighborhood.

Institutions are a last resort.

But it means Denver's neighborhoods have a huge task: caring for children whose parents no longer can, at least temporarily, because their own lives have been shredded by violence, drug use and poverty.

Sometimes, it takes a village

On any given day there are 1,500 children who fit this description in Denver and more than 6,800 statewide.

Early data from Denver's pilot suggest the lives of these children are improving.

In addition to the reduction in institutional care, the number of children being placed with grandparents or aunts and uncles has more than doubled, from 9 percent in 2000 to 19 percent this year.

Richard Wexler, director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, applauds the initiative.

"What we're seeing is that there are fewer children being taken away (from their families), and it's being done without compromising their safety.

"It's far more humane than traditional foster care, and it's long overdue," Wexler said.

The idea behind the initiative is that if communities can care for their own children, keeping them close to the schools, churches and grocery stores they know, and the people who know them, the children are more likely to grow safely into adulthood.

"We always knew that if we took the children away, in the short term, we could keep them safe, but in the long run, they were horribly unsafe," said Roxane White, director of the Denver Department of Human Services.

Check any prison, any drug treatment facility, check the local homeless shelters, and you'll find adults who grew up in foster care, White said, deeply scarred because their ties to birth parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, and teachers and ministers were permanently severed by the government.

"The government doesn't do a very good job of raising kids," White said.

But families and communities often do.

Figuring out how to use neighborhoods, churches, schools and extended families to save children became the holy grail of the Annie E. Casey Foundation in 1992.

The foundation was launched by United Parcel Service founder Jim Casey and named in honor of his mother. It selected Denver as one of 76 national pilot sites for its Family to Family initiative in 2000. Since then, it has spent roughly $1 million in Colorado helping build the neighborhood collaboratives with one goal: helping children return home and fixing their families so it is safe for them to do so.

"Kids belong with their families," said Wanda Mial, who oversees the Family to Family initiative for the Casey Foundation. "If they can't be with their families, then they need to be with their kin.

"Back in 1992 thousands of kids nationwide were languishing in foster care.

"There was no one to adopt them," Mial said. "They wound up with high teenage pregnancy rates. Most didn't finish high school but went straight to homelessness, prisons or the welfare system."

Fourteen years later, Mial said, "We've learned that if we're not engaging communities in the protection of children, public child welfare agencies will always fail."

State officials have been so impressed with Denver's results that they plan to roll out the program in more than half of Colorado's 64 counties by 2009, according to Charles Perez, manager of the child protection unit at the Colorado Department of Human Services.

Next year, Denver will become one of five national training sites funded by the Casey Foundation to help other cities interested in replicating the neighborhood collaboratives.

'It's been a wild . . . ride'

The front lines for this work are out-of-the way spots like Bethany United Methodist Church at First Avenue and King Street in southwest Denver.

It is the headquarters for Westside Family Networks, a collaborative that started last October. Since then, the group has grown to include more than 22 agencies, food banks, housing providers, local business leaders, schools and churches, said Teena Racheli, who chairs the collaborative's board and who also serves as pastor of Bethany United Methodist Church.

Six other collaboratives have formed covering neighborhoods across the city, from Cherry Creek to Montbello.

"There's been a call throughout all the neighborhoods," Racheli said. "It's been a wild, invigorating ride in the best sense."

Since December, the Westside collaborative has served 192 families, helping with food banks, job counseling, substance abuse counseling and parenting classes.

It has coordinated 109 emergency sessions with families in crisis, helping struggling parents find help in the neighborhood for themselves and their children.

Five family advocates are available to help any family in need, reaching them early before their lives are so torn that courts must intervene.

"There is less intimidation here for the families than there is downtown (at the Denver Department of Human Services)," said Anita Santistevan, coordinator of Westside Family Networks.

Twelve organizations have offered supervised visitation sites so parents who've lost custody of their children can visit them close to home, rather than traveling downtown.

More families needed

But what this collaborative still needs - what every community needs - is more foster families who live in the neighborhoods.

"Last October we said our goal would be to recruit 10 new foster families from our neighborhood," Racheli said. Nine months later, not one family has signed.

"We've had a lot of interest. We've had people ask a lot of questions, but we don't have one family ready to go into training. And that surprised me," Racheli said.

Ron Allen is a family advocate for the Westside collaborative, though he doesn't live in the neighborhoods it serves.

A father of five, Allen and his wife, Felicia, were so touched by needs of the children he kept seeing last December that they opted to become foster parents.

Now they're adopting the two young brothers who came to live with them earlier this year, and they're helping recruit prospective foster parents for the collaboratives.

"Ron kept telling me about all of these children," Felicia said. "When I saw their pictures, I said, 'Oh, these are our boys.' "

Though social service officials are optimistic that the neighborhood collaboratives will take hold, few expect the work to be easy.

Keeping children at home, several said, is much harder than simply sending them to family court and out into institutions and non-family foster care.

"It's one thing to believe kids should be with families," said Denver's White.

"It's another to say families are a safe place for them to be."

smithj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5474

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