About
The Who Cares report is a project of Fostering Media Connections, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that publishes The Imprint and Fostering Families Today, and offers the Youth Voices Rising media training program. Learn more at fosteringmediaconnections.org, or get in touch at info@fosteringmediaconnections.org.
Methodology
The goal of this project is to identify recent trends in foster care capacity for each state and Washington, D.C., along with several key indicators of the overall use of family separation.
To do this, we periodically ask states to answer several common questions about their foster care capacity. This 50-state questionnaire was sent every year between 2018 and 2023; we have now begun to administer it every two years.
We also include several sets of relevant data drawn from the federal Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS), and a metric on family separation created by a veteran child welfare statistician.
The number of youth in foster care
We include the number of youth in foster care according to AFCARS.
Because AFCARS generally lags behind current-year information, we also asked each state to provide the number of youth in foster care as of March 31 or the nearest date for which data was available.
The number of foster homes
We ask each state to identify the total number of licensed foster homes, regardless of non-relative or relative status, as of March 31, or the nearest date for which data was available.
We also ask each state to provide the number of non-relative foster homes.
Family separation
The organization Fostering Court Improvement created this measure, which reflects the average number of days a child spends without family (among all children in state). The data sources for this measure are AFCARS, the National Center for Health Statistics, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
The use of relatives to care for youth
We include the number of youth living with relatives, according to AFCARS. We also ask each state to provide the number of relatives with an active, ongoing placement as of March 31 or the nearest date for which data was available.
The use of congregate care
Congregate care is a term that refers to larger foster care placement settings such as group homes and institutions. We include the number of youth living in congregate care, according to AFCARS.
We also ask each state for the number of congregate care providers retained by the child welfare agency on March 31 or the nearest date for which data was available. Some states choose to respond to this with the number of individual providers of congregate care (which may operate several locations); others report an aggregate number of congregate care provider sites.
Limitations
Some states are unable to answer, or are unresponsive to, our questions. Further, while we made an identical request to each state and worked with several to ensure clarity on our questions, it is possible that states define certain data elements differently.
There are likely discrepancies between AFCARS point-in-time data and states’ point-in-time data due to the structure of AFCARS.
It is also important to note that our research questions for this project focuses entirely on issues of quantity. Of greater importance to the child welfare field are policies and practice that ensure the quality and preparedness of all caregivers, and that the removal of children from families is done only when it is absolutely necessary.
