Permanency

All children and youth in the foster care system need and deserve a permanent connection to a committed and caring adult who will provide the same guidance, love and support that a parent would. Permanency provides meaning, purpose, and continuity in a young person’s life and supports continuous development from childhood through adulthood.

It’s really important to make sure before emancipating a youth that they have one person. If I have somebody that I know I can depend on, that loves me and cares that I wake up tomorrow and am still breathing, I can get through it. I can walk through it.

"Youth Perspectives On Permanency" by California Permanency for Youth Project

Our Investments

To nurture permanency and lifelong connections we:

Promote stable, long-term family placements for all children.

• We support "family finding" – a new technology and set of practices that reconnect foster children to the people who love them.

Support permanent families by ensuring families have everything they need to care for their children.

• We invest in organizations that provide direct services and guidance to the families who have opened their hearts and their homes to children from the foster care system.

• We support efforts that change beliefs that some youth are too old to find a permanent family.
• We support technical assistance and training for agencies to alter their policies and organizational culture to embrace youth permanency.

• We are committed to learning "what works", developing a clear cost-benefit analysis for youth permanency work, and disseminating the lessons that have been learned.

For the past eight years, we have supported the California Permanency for Youth Project to pioneer new practices and approaches that have assisted hundreds of youth to find permanent connections.