Volume 8

Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care – Fall Update

The Commission will meet twice this fall, conduct three discussions with former foster youth, birth parents, and foster and adoptive parents, and release its first publication. The listserv is the best way to keep apprised of Commission activities. If you know of anyone who would be interested in, or would benefit from, joining the Commission listserv, please feel free to forward this message to them and encourage them to subscribe.

Meetings

The Commission will meet September 18 - 19 in Minneapolis, and November 24 - 25 in San Francisco. A significant portion of these meetings will be devoted to reviewing the responses to the Commission’s call for input. Policymakers, judges, frontline workers, foster and adoptive parents, former foster youth, academics, advocates, physicians and others have submitted recommendations and input to the Commission. This input will prove invaluable in the Commission’s development of effective, practical policy recommendations to improve federal financing mechanisms and court oversight of child welfare cases.

Following the September and November meetings, the Commission website will be updated to include highlights of these meetings and new documents generated by Commission staff.

New Commission Research

A demographic overview of children in foster care has just been added to the Commission website. This briefing paper highlights basic demographic information – age, race, and ethnicity, length of stay, permanency goals and placement settings on the foster care population.

Upcoming Publications

Before the release of the Commission’s final recommendations, two interim products will be developed and disseminated by the Commission. The first, scheduled for release in late fall, will draw from three discussions conducted with former foster youth, birth parents, and foster and adoptive parents, to illustrate some of the barriers and challenges they face. The second product, to be released early in 2004, is a CD-ROM which will draw from video footage of courtrooms across the country and will illustrate some of the challenges facing the courts. Both publications will illustrate some of the input the Commission has been receiving.