Family to Family Projects

Family to Family is a child welfare reform effort in the Northern Bluegrass Service Region. Family to Family is value-driven, child-focused and outcome-oriented. 

The purpose of Family to Family is to design a foster care system to meet the safety, permanency, and well-being needs of children that enter our child protective services system, especially those coming into foster care. 

In Northern Bluegrass, we have five core strategies at the heart of our Family to Family efforts:

• Recruitment, training and supporting of resource families (foster and relative)
• Building community partnerships
• Team decision making
• Self-evaluation
• Communications

Community Partnerships for Protecting Children (CPPC)- is a child abuse and neglect prevention model. Through the use of research-based tools and strategies, we are working to lift the community partnerships to higher level of work: Preventing children from ever coming to the attention of our child protective services agency.

In Northern Bluegrass, a Community Partnerships for Protecting Children workgroup has been initiated in Grant County. Our work in Grant County strives for the following:

• Engage community partners (parents, private and public service agencies, schools, faith organizations, to name a few), in the work of keeping children safe by providing support to families in need
• Assist these new partners in their new role of preventing and addressing child abuse and neglect with families
• Identify and use data to make informed decisions around strategies that work

For more information or questions, please call or e-mail:

Kate Hackett, MPA, LSW
Family to Family Coordinator
(859) 525-6783

Joel Griffith, MA
Service Region Administrator
(859) 525-6783

After each and every Facilitated Family Team Meeting, parents and service providers are asked to complete a survey to let us know how we are doing and how well this family-centered practice is working for them. 

Why do we do Facilitated Family Team Meetings? Because:

• Every child deserves a family.
• Every family deserves to have a voice in decisions that so affect their lives.
• Every family needs the support of the community, a network of support.
• And, the Cabinet for Health and Family Services needs community partners.

Over the past six months, Recruiting, Training, and Supporting Resource Families Workgroup spent time creating a brochure on the need for foster parents in Northern Bluegrass.  The brochure was developed and produced by eight community partner agencies in collaboration with the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, with technical assistance provided by staff of the Frank Duveneck Arts Center.

The purpose in producing the jointly-owned brochure is to assist with our community-based recruitment plans, which includes recruiting foster homes in communities where there are higher rates of removals of children into care.  The creation of the brochure was a unique training opportunity with our partner organizations around Family to Family values, strategies, and outcomes. 

Through the use of the brochure in community-based recruitment efforts, we are striving to increase the number of foster homes available in targeted communities so that children from these communities can remain in their own communities, their own schools, with their own churches and friends, as well as to increase the number of children placed with families.

The brochure will be used by our collaborative partners in neighborhood walk-abouts and meetings to increase awareness of the need for foster homes in the targeted neighborhoods.

Feel free to print the RTS Brochure to use at community meetings you attend, or contact Debbie Kallmeyer to obtain copies.

All children deserve to live in a family that is safe and permanent.

• All children need to have an adult in their life that provides unconditional and long term love and acceptance. These types of bonds are formed best in families, not institutional settings.
• We believe that all individuals, families, and communities have strengths By identifying and building on those strengths, we can enhance a family's ability to care for their children. Families and children need to be given ownership over the decisions that impact their lives.
• The protection of child and support of their families is a shared responsibility involving not only the public child welfare agency, but also schools, service providers and the larger community.
• Children have connections to siblings, family members, friends and to the communities from which they come. There is value in these connections children have made in their lives. These connections are important to the child's development and identity and should be preserved.
• Race, gender, ethnic background and economic or social status should not play a role in determining the child’s experience in the foster care or protective services system.
• We believe that agencies and individuals should be accountable for the decisions they make on behalf of children.