Keeping Families Together

Keeping Families Together is a program of the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH) that aims to provide supportive housing to vulnerable families in order to enhance children’s safety ^[1] and help prevent foster care placement.^[2] It brings together affordable housing with other social services and city agencies ^[3] to help families with issues like substance abuse, medication management, parenting skills and career counseling.^[2]

Keeping Families Together was launched in 2007 with a $700,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to CSH.^[4] RWJF had been tracking several high-profile child welfare cases in the news, which revealed that children had died from abuse and neglect while living with families who experienced homelessness, behavioral health problems and involvement in the child welfare system.^[2]

With support from RWJF, CSH developed the Keeping Families Together pilot program,^[2] and secured 30 units of permanent housing in New York City.^[2] Between October 2007 and July 2009, 29 families participated in the pilot program.^[5] The pilot program paired supportive housing with on-site case management and family preservation services.^[2]

The Keeping Families Together model combines affordable housing with services to prevent foster care placement, stabilize at-risk families and improve family functioning.^[2] The model addresses the needs of the most vulnerable families that present the highest cost to society.^[6]

To be eligible for Keeping Families Together, families must have current child welfare involvement and must qualify as chronically homeless or at risk of becoming chronically homeless, in which the head of the household suffers from a substance abuse disorder, a disabling medical condition or HIV/AIDS.^[2]

With a goal of preventing crisis-driven child welfare interventions, the KFT model streamlines the resources of multiple city and state agencies to help families develop long-term service plans. Case managers work with families to identify their needs, such as substance abuse treatment, medication management, parenting skills training and domestic violence services.^[2]

CSH y Metis Associates, una firma de consultoría nacional, evaluaron el programa piloto, ^{[ 7 ]} que realizó un seguimiento a 29 familias participantes de la ciudad de Nueva York desde octubre de 2007 hasta julio de 2009. ^{[ 2 ]} Antes de participar en el programa, el 62 por ciento de los niños nacidos de familias piloto habían estado en hogares de acogida en algún momento, y el 19 por ciento había estado en una colocación informal fuera del hogar. ^{[ 2 ]} La evaluación informó que, a junio de 2010, 26 de las 29 familias que participaron en el piloto permanecían en viviendas de apoyo. ^{[ 1 ]} El programa también resultó en el cierre del 61,1 por ciento de los casos de bienestar infantil de las familias participantes. Además, casi la mitad de las familias no tuvieron más participación en el bienestar infantil al final del piloto. ^{[ 8 ]}

Seis niños que habían sido separados de sus familias por los servicios de protección infantil se reunieron con ellas al finalizar el programa piloto. Cinco de estos seis niños llevaban más de 12 meses de vuelta con sus familias tras la finalización del programa. ^{[ 2 ]}

PR Newswire informó que antes del programa piloto Keeping Families Together, hubo 101 casos de abuso o negligencia, en comparación con 13 casos después de la participación en el programa piloto. ^{[ 2 ]}