Chapin Hall

Many people chose to become foster parents after careful deliberation, then they moved through the official training and certification process before welcoming children into their home. For many others, becoming a foster parent was not something they had considered until a related child needed care, and then they stepped up to support their family. Statistics show that children have better outcomes when they remain with family or “fictive kin” (close family friends) versus people who are strangers to them, and many kinship families aren’t known to child welfare systems. The month of September is dedicated to kinship care. While kinship care month is celebrated by many child welfare jurisdictions, children in kinship foster care make up a tiny share of all children in kinship care. For every one child in kinship foster care, there are 19 children in kinship care outside of the formal child welfare system. These families are often referred to as “informal” kinship families because of their outside-of-the-system status and, historically, they have not gotten the same financial or social supports that families in the child welfare system have. The month is also dedicated to those families who did step up to care for a family member when children services became involved with the intention of not having their family member placed into stranger foster care.

Forging Families

Keeton’s* family was made up of his grandpa and step-grandma for most of his upbringing. While Keeton’s grandpa had guardianship, they did not receive the benefits official foster families do, such as subsidized childcare, health insurance, and foster care maintenance payments. In fact, Keeton recalls his grandpa—a retired factory worker on disability—often using the last of his pocket change to buy them bread at a bakery outlet store.

“Throughout my entire time before college, I only knew a handful of people who were in the situation I was,” said Keeton. “That can be really challenging; you can look around and see that your home environment is different from others.”

Another kinship caregiver, Onita, didn’t know it yet, but she would soon be in a similar role as Keeton’s grandpa. She had finished raising her kids and began to consider what she wanted the next act of her life to look like. Not a fan of the weather in Southwest Ohio, she started exploring the idea of going south. She also wanted to go somewhere safe with temperate weather where she could immerse herself in the culture and speak some Spanish. She ultimately decided on Panama and took the leap. Several months into her new life, she received a call from her sister who needed help in her retirement years as her body started feeling the effects of a long, physically demanding career as a policewoman. After only four and a half months in Panama, Onita returned to the Dayton, Ohio area and found out her sister wouldn’t need her help after all, as she’d hired a home health aide.

Onita got a new apartment and bought a car. But the most significant thing she received, as she embarked on yet another new beginning, came in the form of a letter from Montgomery County Children Services. To her shock, the letter announced that her granddaughter, Skylah, whom she last saw at age six, had been in foster care for six months. Now nine years old, Onita feared her granddaughter might not even remember her. Following years of serious relationship issues including a period in which they’d made Onita’s life “a living hell,” she was estranged from her eldest son and his girlfriend, Skylah’s father and mother.

Becoming a Mothering Grandmother

“I didn’t know what to do so I held onto the letter for about a week, asking myself: Where’s my son and my granddaughter’s mother? I knew they had some issues, but they seemed to know how to get by,” Onita said. “I called children’s services and asked the case manager what the circumstances were. My granddaughter hadn’t been in school, and it was a case of neglect.”

Onita fretted over the decision to visit with and perhaps start the process of gaining guardianship of Skylah. She thought: What if Skylah had been an infant or toddler? How would this affect her life as a woman in her 50s? Ultimately, though, she didn’t want her granddaughter to be in foster care and she feared if Skylah got adopted, she might never see her again. “I was thinking about all the things she and I might miss.” So, the process began slowly, with Onita first meeting with her granddaughter at the Montgomery County Children’s Services office. That transitioned into picking Skylah up and going out to do things together and, finally, Skylah staying overnight at her grandmother’s place. In the beginning of 2024, Onita was granted legal guardianship over Skylah.

Connecting with OhioKAN 

“When my granddaughter arrived, I had to ask myself two questions: How might she fit into my life and how might I fit into hers?” Onita said. As Skylah grew, Onita’s one-bedroom apartment became too cramped for them but Onita—as a full-time caregiver—was no longer able to work the part-time job that had supplemented her full-time self-employment. An internet search for assistance led her to OhioKAN, a flexible and responsive kinship and adoption navigator program designed to support children, youth, and their families.

“We lived in my tiny one-bedroom apartment for two months until my lease was up. And then we moved. I could not have done it on my own. Miss Lindsey at OhioKAN helped me access financial resources,” Onita said during her keynote speech at the 2024 Public Children Services Association of Ohio (PCSAO) Annual Conference.

With external partners, Chapin Hall experts helped develop the OhioKAN program model and provided implementation support and training as the program began its staged rollout. They also co-created the OhioKAN program manual, a workforce development framework, and performance management system intended to promote consistent practice and ongoing improvement across the state.

“Over the past few decades, there has been a widespread practice of moving children to the homes of family members outside of foster care. One of the unintended consequences is that it cuts off a lot of resources that caregivers need to care for a child,” said Chapin Hall Senior Policy Analyst Stephanie Armendariz, who has been working on multiple aspects of OhioKAN for several years.

“We’re not saying that more kids need to be in foster care, but child welfare systems need to think about resources that these kinship families need and keep in mind the ultimate goal of reunification with their parents whenever possible. It’s okay for that to happen outside the child welfare system, but we don’t want to see families fall through the cracks.”

A kinship navigator program was exactly what Onita needed to find resources so she and Skylah could find a larger place. Onita knew Skylah needed a room of her own and that they both needed privacy.

“The OhioKAN staff were really good about responding to requests. When I first got a hold of my future navigator, she asked what I needed and I gave her a list of things I was interested in. She told me what and where to fill out forms and all the things I needed to do,” said Onita. “Then, they helped me get the first month’s rent and security deposit for the two-bedroom townhome we live in now. I wasn’t prepared for an unexpected expense; I kind of underestimated how much it would take to take care of Skylah.”

OhioKAN is seen in the child welfare field as one of the model examples of a kinship care program. It covers a lot of ground: In addition to information and referral services, the kinship navigator program offers assistance obtaining benefits and services, individualized supports, legal referrals, and training. The program also connects caregivers to each other through support groups and social opportunities. Program staff also convene regional advisory councils and a statewide advisory council that build community capacity to respond to the unique needs of kinship and adoptive families. OhioKAN splits Ohio’s 88 counties into 10 regions in which local navigators and regional directors with expert knowledge of the area and community serve their clients.

Building Together: OhioKAN & Chapin Hall  

Kinnect responded to the State of Ohio’s request to design a kinship and adoptive navigator program in response to the Family First Service Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), which provides states federal matching dollars for the provision of prevention services implemented by a federally approved navigator program. Kinnect knew the value of implementation science and wanted a partner that embraced the science. Implementation science is the study of methods to promote the adoption and integration of evidence-based practices and interventions into routine health care and public health settings to improve the impact on population health. After meeting with Chapin Hall’s Dr. Krista Thomas, Shannon Deinhart, executive director and co-founder of Kinnect, said she knew Chapin Hall was the right partner for them.

“Krista Thomas was our first contact. I already knew about Chapin Hall and what I could see in Krista was the willingness to work within the implementation framework. It wouldn’t be a cookie-cutter approach; it would be exactly what we needed: a custom-made program,” Deinhart said.

Chapin Hall worked with Kinnect to ensure program manuals and materials were developed that would meet the requirements of the Title IV-E Prevention Clearinghouse standards. The Clearinghouse is the federal resource that reviews and rates programs to help states and child welfare agencies know which programs work best to keep kids safely with their families and out of foster care.

OhioKAN used Chapin Hall’s expertise to ensure the program’s values were incorporated into all aspects of the navigator program. Chapin Hall also supported Kinnect to Family, a program developed by Kinnect that is based on the 30 Days to Family model, an intensive, short-term intervention for children entering foster care that aims to place a child with a safe and appropriate relative or kin within 30 days of removal from their home. Experts at Chapin Hall helped design and refine implementation supports and structures to maximize positive outcomes for youth in foster care, with the goal of reunifying them with family members. Chapin Hall played another critical role in helping Kinnect to Family identify a Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Framework which is used by the Kinnect team to ensure fidelity to the model and that young people and kinship caregivers have what they need to care for their youth. Chapin Hall’s work with the Kinnect has been shaped by the organization’s extensive knowledge and experience from across the nation in many diverse jurisdictions.

As a member of Kinnect’s Young Adult Advisory Council, Keeton has brought his own lived experience to his job as the near-peer support person. He and the council have recently launched a podcast called “Care to Conquer,” that highlights young peoples’ experiences with child welfare systems. Keeton was always keenly aware of his kinship family’s precarious financial situation and that became more pronounced when his grandpa died. Still a minor at 17, Keeton felt lucky that his step-grandma (who had been divorced from his grandpa for years) was willing and able to become his official caregiver.

“I think having OhioKAN would have provided significant assistance for me and my family,” Keeton said. “Yes, families can sometimes access supports for the cost of things [without the help of a navigator program], but also having social supports can be really invaluable.”

When Onita reconnected with her, Skylah was nearly nine years old and had about four months of schooling in total, which occurred after she had entered foster care. She’s now 11 years old and in fourth grade. “She’s doing the work,” Onita said. “She’s still behind, but she’s working hard.” Onita, who just began teaching English composition part-time at a community college, is also a writer and an amateur photographer. “I’ve tried to expose Skylah to as much as possible: art museums, galleries, the YMCA, and summer camp for kids whose parents have substance abuse issues.”

Why Kinship Care Works & How It’s Evolving 

As an evidence-based organization, backing a proven intervention like kinship care makes sense. Chapin Hall Policy Fellow Shaun Lane frames kinship navigation as “one element of a kin-first philosophy and set of practices which really has strong empirical support for it.” He reminds people that “foster care is not a benign intervention,” as it often begets trauma from multiple placements and lack of stability.

“For kids who have reason to be in the care of someone other than their parent, placement with a relative tends to be more stable and less traumatic. Kids need a safe place to grow in relation with their caregivers. Kinship care and navigation is part of a larger view about the incredible value of relatives as part of the support system for kids.”

Relatives, fictive kin, and others with lived experience are critical when building kinship navigator programs. “Kinnect’s first step when designing OhioKAN, was to hold listening sessions and we had the benefit of what they learned from lived experts and advocates who attended these town halls across the state,” Armendariz noted.

Based on her own lived experience, Onita would still like to see improvements for kinship care families, including assurance that government agencies are communicating with one another and that tailored resources are triggered once a family is identified as a kinship care family. “Our needs are a little bit different; we need a little something different,” she noted.

Some help did arrive in 2023 via a federal rule change that allows Title IV-E agencies— government offices like a state child welfare agency that gets money from the federal government to match the dollars they spend to provide services to children and their families—to create separate licensing or approval standards for kinship caregivers. The standards can reduce unnecessary barriers and support access to foster care maintenance payments that help families meet the unique demands of kinship care.  Chapin Hall experts recently authored a brief with a phased framework to help agencies implement these standards.

Onita has built a strong support system in navigators at OhioKAN and others—people like case workers at Montgomery County and close family members and friends—who listen and have her and Skylah’s best interest at heart.

“I believe all kinship caregivers want—and caregivers in general—is to be heard.”

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*All kinship care participants in this feature story are referred to by only their first names or kinship titles.