Prioritized List of Services
To Promote Permanence For Children

While we agree that a full range of well-developed child welfare services will need to be created over time, the following list summarizes the services most urgently needed to address the permanency needs of orphans and abandoned children living in institutional care. Although this list is rank ordered from most to least important, the specific needs of children and families in each country may require deviation from this step by step formula.

1. In-home, family supportive services to prevent institutionalization and re-institutionalization. Providing services to high risk families in their homes and communities to prevent the need for out-of-home placement is critical. In order to also prevent re-entry of reunited children into out-of-home placement, target families must include those whose children have been reunified from placement.

   Development of community based supportive services is a necessary component of this approach. Options might include short-term, time-limited respite or foster care placement for families in crisis; day care and protective day care; home health or nursing visitors; child development services; and/or income support. This array is essential to keeping many children, including children with disabilities, in their own homes. The proposed Families for Orphans Act will foster and promote the development and sustainability of such services by governments and NGOs in the project communities and countries.

2. Reunification. A primary program objective is to identify and prepare a child's primary and extended family members to provide safe, permanent care for a child or siblings currently living in institutional care. This step includes offering supportive and family rehabilitation services for children (including children with disabilities) and their families that can prepare family members for a child to move home, and that will stabilize and sustain a home placement.
3. Adoption — domestic and international. Families can be provided for orphans whether through in-country adoption by relatives or agency-approved adoptive families or through international adoption, when the child's home country is supportive of this plan. Children residing in long-term foster care will be evaluated to determine how to create permanence for those children, without subjecting them to unnecessary separation and placement trauma.
4. Guardianship, mentoring and independent living for older children and youth, with family members or with members of their community. Guardianship and mentoring for older children and youth combined with emancipation/transitional housing/independent living services for youth aging out of institutional care will increase older children's opportunity to develop into self-sustaining adults.
5. Foster care services. Foster care will not be considered a permanent alternative to institutional care. Foster care is a short-term intervention that can provide care for children while other, permanent plans are crystallizing. For babies, short-term foster care should be the primary short-term intervention to avoid a child ever being institutionalized. Short-term foster care will also be viewed as a potential path to permanency for many children, through post-adopt programs. In circumstances where foster families want to keep children in their homes, the care arrangement should be made legally permanent through legal custody, guardianship, or adoption or another permanency option must be developed. Frequent moves out of foster care placements must be avoided.
6. Community responses to child abuse and neglect. Communities have an imperative to develop and improve community-based and government regulated reporting systems that identify children being abused, neglected, or sexually abused in their families or in substitute care. Services must include investigation and legal intervention when indicated, risk and safety assessment, in-home interventions to protect children in their own families, and removal and placement to assure child safety when children cannot be protected at home.
7. Strengthening public policy to support governments' abilities to sustain family care programs for all children long-term. This involves work with government leaders, parliaments, and other governing bodies to create policy change and encourage governments to take on the moral and financial responsibility of deinstitutionalizing children and giving them the opportunity to grow up with parents. This work will also include examination of financial impacts of family care versus institutionalization.

Quick Links

Kidsave Advocacy

Families for Orphans Act

Families for Orphans Coalition

Frequently Asked Questions

Policy in Action

Prioritized Lists of Services to Promote Permanence for Children

FFOA Section by Section

Families for Orphans Coalition
Executive Committee

Jane Aronson,
Worldwide Orphan Foundation, orphandoctor@aol.com

Terry Baugh, Kidsave, terry@kidsave.org

Thomas DiFilipo,
Joint Council on International Children’s Services, tdifilipo@jcics.org

Chuck Johnson,
National Council for Adoption, cjohnson@adoptioncouncil.org

McLane Layton, EACH -- Equality for Adopted Children, mclane@
equalityforadoptedchildren.org

Brian Luwis, The Institute
for Orphan Advocacy, brian.luwis@awaa.org

Judith Rycus, The Institute for Human Services, JSRycus@aol.com