The Children’s Receiving Home’s has partnered with Lilliput Children's Services to provide Kinship Support Services (KSSP) onsite at the Children's Receiving Home.
The Issue:
Of the 500,000 foster care children nationwide, approximately one-quarter-more than 124,000-live with relatives. In Sacramento County alone, at least 30,000 grandparents are caring for their grandchildren. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives provide an important safety net for children whose parents are unavailable or unable to safely care for them. Often times unprepared to assume a parental role, these kinship care givers tend to live on fixed incomes and face a multitude of challenges from registering children for school and accessing health care to providing food and shelter for their newly formed family.
How KSSP helps:
KSSP provides support to relative caregivers, who are struggling with the challenges of raising kin. Through intensive outreach, KSSP is uniquely positioned to offer support services to grandparents and caregivers raising their kin, as well as the children in these families.
- In-home Support
- Assistance with Basic Needs
Impact on the children:
- Children are safer than those placed with unrelated foster families.
- Relative foster placements are more stable than those with unrelated foster families.
- Siblings are less likely to be separated.
- Children maintain community and cultural connections.
- Relatives are often willing to adopt or become permanent guardians when reunification is not possible.
Impact on our community:
Seeking to strengthen the family unit and prevent children from entering the child welfare system; The KSSP program is preventative in nature, holistic in its approach to serving families and ultimately works to keep children safely within their extended families. By receiving kinship support services, these families thrive and juvenile homelessness, delinquency, teenage pregnancy, alcohol/drug abuse and incarceration is drastically reduced.
For more information on Lilliput Children's Services, please visit their website at www.lilliput.org
