(2008) May is Foster Care Month, and for the 20th anniversary celebration of the campaign, Connect for Kids spoke with Candice Douglass, communications director with Casey Family Programs, to get the latest on foster care and child well-being, and emerging trends we should all know about. We also got the scoop the Kinship Caregiver Support Act currently in Congress and an innovative approach to permanency for teens in a Q&A with Celeste Bodner, executive director of FosterClub, the national network for young people in foster care. Find out what’s new, what’s working, and how you can make a difference no matter how much time you’ve got to give.

If you work with teens with disabilities, you’ll want to know about the Social Security Administration’s Ticket to Work (TTW) program. Its Youth Transition portion offers funds for organizations that help students receiving Social Security disability benefits find employment. Is it right for you? Melody Goodspeed, Youth Transition Specialist for TTW answers some common questions about the funding.

Could you have made it entirely on your own at 18 or 21? Each year, roughly 25,000 young people “age out” of the foster care system, many without family or economic supports. Without connection to a caring adult and support to plan and prepare, these youth face steep challenges, including higher rates of unemployment, poor educational attainment, health issues, incarceration, and homelessness. But those are the problems, the statistics—what about the potential of these teens, and their desire to succeed? We spoke with Betsy Krebs, co-director of the New York City-based Youth Advocacy Center, about what works to help teens aging out of foster care succeed. There’s room for the whole community...

I was somewhat surprised when I recently came across the following paragraph on the Voices for America’s Children Website: “As a society we pay a steep price for allowing one in five of our nation’s children to live in poverty. Economists estimate the annual national cost of persistent childhood poverty due to lost adult productivity and wages, increased crime, and higher health expenditures is massive: approximately $500 billion or four percent of the nation’s gross domestic product”...

In keeping with our promise to track the responses the New York Times had to its “A History of Neglect” series on foster care in New York, we selected a core question from the fourth and final week of responses.

Mississippi plans a serious overhaul of its child welfare system to do more to protect the approximately 3,400 abused and neglected children in its care. Here's an overview of the details of this comprehensive reform plan, developed as a settlement of a class action lawsuit brought against the state by Children's Rights.

In November 2007, the New York Times ran a three-part series on the struggles of minority-run foster care agencies in New York City that found "a trail of scandals and disappointments, as well as a new commitment to better caring for the city’s vulnerable black and Latino children." The online version includes reader commentary and questions for reporters and experts. Connect for Kids will join and track these online conversations for our readers.

Because, on so many occasions during my Child Advocacy work in recent years—most recently as the founder and editor of the non profit Child Advocacy 360 News Network—I have witnessed such good research on children’s rights and child well-being, and such poor communication of the results, and such miserable follow up in leveraging the findings for the benefit of children that I have pledged to do my own “ What ever happened to….” research on this major area of underachievement, and report it in these blog-like writings. My challenge to Child advocacy researchers : Show us your battle plan post-press release and press notices. Show us the return on investment for children. It’s time for true accountability.

One of my great pleasures as an editor is to periodically "surf the sites" in child advocacy. I often find what to me, at least, are fresh stories of good works and good results that serve as an inspiration for my work at Child Advocacy 360 and Connect for Kids. RuralSuccess.org has several winning examples.

October 2007—Our partner Child Advocacy 360 brings you "Readers' Choice Stories," in which readers vote with their eyes, clicks and emails on the best of Who's Doing What That Works.