NICWA Attends White House Child Welfare Transformation Convening
On July 30, 2024, NICWA joined tribal leaders, policymakers, impacted families, and partners at the White House Child Welfare Transformation Convening. We gathered to celebrate the significant policy changes in the last year that recognize and strengthen the opportunity and support for kinship or relative care within the child welfare system. These new policies, which facilitate system shifts, will bring substantial benefits to Native children, families, and communities.
“Our kinship care policy advocacy and implementation technical assistance efforts directly tie to our commitment to keep kids connected to their families, communities, and cultures,” said NICWA Executive Director Sarah Kastelic. “Native communities have long relied on extended family care as the cornerstone of child safety, nurturance, and well-being. NICWA has been at the forefront of advocacy for a kinship-first policy, breaking down silos between family-serving systems and ensuring kinship caregiver support and resources as a best practice. Together, these efforts recognize relative caregivers as essential to the support and care of Native children.”
Our work with the Grandfamilies & Kinship Support Network (Network), a national technical service center, can help tribes and states fully implement these important policy changes. Along with Network partners, we work across jurisdictional and systemic boundaries to improve support and services for families in which grandparents, other relatives, or close family friends are raising children whose parents are unable to do so. Through the Bridging Systems for Kinship Families Program, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin Family Services Department will be our tribal partner for two years of intensive technical assistance. This technical assistance program promotes systems collaboration between tribal departments and externally with state or county government systems and nonprofit service providers to serve all kinship/relative caregiving families better. Second, the Development and Implementation of Tribal Foster Care and Relative/Kinship Care Standards: Second Edition outlines critical considerations and processes for tribes to create locally appropriate kinship care standards.
NICWA continues to provide technical assistance that supports tribal capacity and collaborative systems development to enhance the level and quality of child welfare services. These efforts include collaborating with tribal communities to inform policy changes that ensure child welfare programs honor tribal cultures, values, and teachings and support the integrity of extended family systems.