Lately we have been highlighting many of the deficiencies with the foster care system. Foster children are able to leave group homes or run away without anyone reporting them missing to the police. Foster kids are physically beaten, sexually abused and, in the worst cases, killed all while in foster care. Yet there is a group of professionals who do their utmost to help these children.
Family finding specialists are just that, social workers who specialize in identifying, locating and notifying adult family members of children in foster care. When a child enters the system, the clock starts running for agencies to notify relatives. Federal law gives agencies thirty (30) days to complete this search.
Here in the U.S., an obscene amount of personal information is gathered and then sold to database companies. The leading companies are Intelius, U.S. Search and LexisNexis. By accessing these databases, case workers can find several family members of a foster child in about 10 minutes. The success rate is as high as 85%. Job well done.
However, there are tens of thousands of cases where no other family is found in the U.S., but there is evidence of relatives living outside the U.S. These are the cases that really stress case workers.
Imagine for a moment that your job and joy is to protect children and move them to a safe environment, preferably to a forever home with loving, caring relatives. Now picture that you have two little foster children, sisters. They have been in the system for years. One was born while her father was in jail so she has never met her dad. You have a birth certificate listing the name of their mother and her relatives. You know the city and state where they live except they live in Mexico.
Where do you start? Who do you call? We have talked with hundreds of cases workers over the years. Some openly share how frustrating it is for them. Whether you believe it or not, many of these professionals are bleeding with pain that they can't make any progress.
Case workers use terms such as:
We have received countless calls from case workers asking for our help. It has never been a case worker who decided not to get help; it's their directors who decided not to get the resources they needed so their Family Finding Specialists could locate a foster child's relatives.
How crazy is this? Can you imagine a company hoping to stay in business yet knowing they will fail if they don't get marketing or customer service help but refusing to get it? For the PC crowd, we'll call it irresponsible. When it comes to not taking action that results in a child having to spend additional years in a government institution with the risk of being forced out onto the street with no family connections, I personally call that action heinous.
On the other hand, we have been on the receiving end of hearing absolute joy when we told a case worker that the relatives of one of their foster children was found. One Family Finding Specialist said:
Another was a little shell shocked asking, "How did that one happen?!" while another who got the news that two brothers of a foster kid were living in New York exclaimed, "That's HUGE!!" Rosie Lopez, Case Manager, emotionally shared that the family is "so, so happy" to be reconnected with their relative in foster care.
We don't usually share the emotions, feelings or reactions of case workers to the frustrations or success of finding relatives. We want the foster children to be center stage since they deserve it. But it's important for you to know that no matter the next tragic story about a foster child, there are caring men and women who take their responsibilities very seriously. They will put in extra hours, spend their Saturdays with a foster kid and fight to the best of their ability to get the help they know they need.
Now it's time for social service executives to recognize these needs. They must be made to provide resources so more foster youth can have a forever home. And maybe along the way, a few more dedicated, caring Family Finding Specialists can enjoy their Saturday knowing it's the end of another week, but a week of a job well done.
Do it for the children,
Richard
Richard Villasana
Find Families In Mexico
760-690-3995
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