The W.K. Kellogg Foundation has awarded $21.7 million in grants to nine groups under a grant program designed to spur reform of state adoption and foster-care systems.
The nine “Families for Kids” sites will work to insure that more children in foster care are placed with permanent adoptive families, said Valora Washington, a vice president of the foundation.
“The reforms advanced by the Families for Kids projects hold great promise for our children and for the nation’s child-welfare systems,” she said.
The Battle Creek, Mich., foundation unveiled the grant program two years ago, issuing a nationwide request for proposals. (See Education Week, 03/25/92.)
The foundation awarded one-year planning grants last year to 19 projects in 14 states and the District of Columbia. Late last month, nine of the projects received implementation grants ranging from $1 million to $3 million each.
Five Objectives
The Kellogg Foundation’s new grant recipients will be expected to meet five objectives: help families solve their own problems; better coordinate various family services; link families with one team of caseworkers; assign children to a single foster home in their own neighborhood; and place children in a permanent home within one year of entry into the foster-care system.
The foundation also awarded:
- $250,000 to the National Center for State Courts in Williamsburg, Va., to help state supreme courts streamline the handling of cases involving children and their families; and
- $1.56 million to the University of Michigan law school to provide technical assistance to the nine projects, to promote teaching of child-welfare issues in law schools, and to establish fellowships in child-welfare law.
The nine grant recipients included agencies and organizations in Arizona, Ohio, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, South Carolina and Washington State.
In recent years, several other foundations have targeted efforts to promote family preservation, among them the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.
