[Child Welfare\Foster Care]
In November, Congressmember Karen Bass (D-Calif.) joined Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Ways and Means Worker and Family Support Subcommittee Chairman Danny K. Davis, and Ranking Member Jackie Walorski in introducing the Family First Transition Act to help states transform their child welfare systems and keep more children safely at home, instead of placing them in foster care.
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Much work remains to be done on issue of child welfare including strenthening the foster care and adoption systems.
Congressmember Karen Bass (D-Calif.), co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth, will secure the following wins when the two consolidated appropriations acts passed by the House of Representatives earlier this week are signed into law in the 2020 funding deal.
Family First Transition Act
In November, Congressmember Karen Bass (D-Calif.) joined Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Ways and Means Worker and Family Support Subcommittee Chairman Danny K. Davis, and Ranking Member Jackie Walorski in introducing the Family First Transition Act to help states transform their child welfare systems and keep more children safely at home, instead of placing them in foster care.
This legislation will provide states with the resources to successfully implement the Family First Prevention Services Act which became law last year. The bill drew on the Family First Transition and Support Act of 2019, which was introduced by Co-Chairs of the Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth in May.
The bill:
*Secures $2,750,000 additional funding for the Family First Clearinghouse to accelerate the implementation of the clearinghouse of promising, supported, and well-supported practices.
*Temporarily allows states to spend Title IV-E dollars for a greater share of prevention activities that meet only the “promising,” or “supported” levels of evidence.
*Appropriates $500 million for state, territories, and tribes. The funds may be used flexibly for any purpose allowed under Title IV-B of the Social Security Act, as well as for activities directly related to implementing Family First and for any activity previously funded under a state or tribe’s Title IV-E waiver project.
*Appropriates funding to ensure each state or tribe that operated a Title IV-E waiver project as of the last day of FY2019, will receive no less than 90% of the maximum federal Title IV-E funding available to them under their waiver project in FY2020 and no less than 75% of that amount for FY2021. States in which the waiver project was operated by, or in, distinct localities (e.g., in certain counties) must ensure that the funding is distributed to those localities in a manner that is proportionate to the localities’ loss of waiver funding.
Kinship Navigator Funding:
$20,000,000 for grants to each State, territory, and Indian tribe operating title IV–E plan for developing, enhancing, or evaluating kinship navigator programs, with a minimum of grant awards of $200,000 for states and $25,000 for tribes.
