Denver child-welfare workers have found you do need a village to raise a child in trouble, but it’s even better when the family can help, too.
For the past five years, the city’s human services department has used an innovative program that tries to keep at-risk kids with their immediate families or with relatives, rather than sending them into foster-care, after problems such as abuse or neglect develop inside the home. The idea is to keep children safe but within familiar and supportive circles.
So far, it’s been a success. The rate of children who are re-abused or neglected has dropped to 2.5 percent – less than half the national acceptable rate.
“We used to take kids away from a home,” said Roxane White, Denver’s Human Services director. “Now we go into the home and help the family.”
The Family to Family approach was pioneered by the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation in 1992 to give families control over the fate of their loved ones, rather than judges and social workers.
Denver adopted the plan in 2002. The city has been named one of three nationally that will be models for other agencies hoping to duplicate the program. Within a decade, workers in every county in Colorado will have been trained by the city.
Family to Family is becoming more popular because it engages a community network – relatives, neighbors, social workers, teachers, foster families. The group decides on the best plan for a child. If that means removing the child from the home, the first choice is to place the child with a relative. If that doesn’t work, then with a foster family in the child’s neighborhood.
Denver handles about 135 families with 240 children in the child welfare system each month. More than 60 percent of the children stay with family.
The program already has helped hundreds of children. Mayor John Hickenlooper notes abused children who aren’t offered proper support are more likely to drop out of school or join gangs, or both. A family-friendly approach is more likely to serve the child and the community.
