After spending more than 30 years working in the field of child welfare — most of those years in residential programs — I was one of those child welfare professionals who erroneously believed that teenagers wanted to live “independently” when they left care and not with “families.” I believed that our job was to teach “life skills” (I even wrote a book about it — Life Skills for Living in the Real World) and to help teens exiting the foster care system to “be self sufficient.”   I didn’t think the teens I worked with wanted to live with families, until one day I went back to the group home that I supervised and did an informal survey.  During their dinner hour, I asked the teens with whom I worked — “If I could guarantee you a permanent life time connection, how many of you would like to have that?”  I fully expected that maybe one or two would raise their hands, and was shocked instead that more than a third of them put their hands up – at 17, 18, and 19 years old, they were still hoping for a family!  I realized at that point how wrong I had been: These young people did need ‘life skills” but they also desperately wanted and needed families to love and care for them for their entire lives — not just until they turned 21 and exited foster care! I felt terrible that I had made that assumption, and in fact, after 20 years of being a “foster parent” to my own daughter, I legally adopted her when she was 34 years old because she asked me to.

This NCCWE Youth Permanency Toolkit, developed under the National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections (NRCPFC) cooperative agreement, addresses the topic of permanency for older youth and young adults. This is a critically important topic to the field of child welfare because ALL children and youth need permanent, loving families — not just babies and young children — and as a child welfare profession, we need to continue to work to establish these meaningful connections for every teenager and young adult in foster care.  While it is essential that youth have the skills necessary to transition to adulthood, no one is ever truly independent: At every age, we are all interdependent and need people in our lives that care about us and support us — older youth and young adults in the child welfare system are no exception. While the field of child welfare now has a greater understanding of the necessity of establishing permanent connections for older youth and young adults in care, achieving permanency for this population remains a challenge. 
I am grateful to our colleagues at the Children’s Bureau/ACF/DHHS for their insight into the need for such a toolkit. Taffy Compain, Federal Project Officer for the National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections, has spearheaded this process and provided guidance and direction in making this Toolkit a reality.

I want thank the staff and consultants at the National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections for their work on this toolkit. I want to recognize Joan Morse, Assistant Director at the NRCPFC, who coordinated the development of the toolkit and NRCPFC project consultants, Madelyn Freundlich, who participated in the initial development, and Lauren Frey, 3P Consulting LLC, who helped frame the final version and highlighted the best practice casework tools in youth permanency. 

Best Regards,
Gary Mallon