SNAP Changes at a Glance

• Individuals newly subject to SNAP work requirements may begin to lose benefits.

• The USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, which oversees SNAP, has updated its noncitizen eligibility guidance.

• NCSL and other national organizations are advocating for a time-limited extension of the cost-shifting provisions.

• States are working to reduce payment error rates and streamline SNAP processes

Read full press statement from Rep. Julia Brownley here.  

• establishing a new approval process for certifying relative caregivers,

• expanding relative support programming, and

• ensuring that payments made to certified relative caregivers are equal to those received by licensed foster caregivers.

Additionally, the Act requires the development of a relative reconsideration review process to review decisions related to the denial of relative caregiver certification, denial of placement with a relative, or denial of visitation with a relative.

See here for a summary of the KIND Act prepared by the America Bar Association of the KIND Act

See here for more information from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services about the KIND Act

See here for the FY2025 Annual Report on the KIND Act

See here for a press statement by the Governor’s office upon enactment of the KIND Act

This section of the Supporting America’s Families Act requires the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in consultation with other agencies and experts, to issue guidance to states on best practices regarding data collection and data sharing on residential programs serving youth in foster care

Overview of the Section

Children and youth in foster care generally live with kin (relatives or close family friends), with a foster family, or in a residential placement (often referred to as congregate care). Many stakeholders agree that residential services are an important part of the continuum of services that should be accessible when children with high levels of need require residential treatment. Most experts also agree that this level of service should be utilized with great care only when needed for appropriate treatment.   Over the years, research studies have shown that youth placed in residential settings may face a number of challenges accessing the supportive relationships, educational services, and stability they need to thrive. 

This provision of the Supporting America’s Families Act strives to address the lack of consistent national data on the circumstances and outcomes of the children and youth in residential placements – including information on the frequency of abuse within residential facilities. The Act gives the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) two years to develop and disseminate guidance for IV-E agencies on best practices related to: 

• Data collection and sharing on the well-being of youth in residential programs, including youth in out-of-state facilities or in programs that operate in multiple states; and

• Data collection and sharing on the maltreatment of youth in residential settings.

The Supporting America’s Families Act also requires HHS to develop and disseminate best practices on improving oversight of residential treatment facilities that receive federal funds and “research-based strategies for risk assessment related to the health, safety, and well-being of youth in the facilities.”

In its overview of the law, the Congressional Research Service describes that HHS must consult with several other agencies including the Department of Education, the Administration for Children and Families, and the Department of Justice when developing the guidance. It should also be developed concurrent with another broader study that was required by the Stop Institutional Child Abuse and Neglect Act (P.L. 118-194) in 2024. 

Provisions from Section 14 were originally included in the Promoting Accountability, Reporting, Information Sharing and Health Act introduced by Representatives Greg Stuebe (R-FL) and Jimmy Panetta (D-CA).

Without High-Quality Data on Residential Treatment Facilities, Leaders Lack the Information They Need to Ensure the Needs of Youth Are Met and Their Rights are Protected

There is abundant research showing that children and youth fare best when they live with family-based settings, especially when they can live in their communities and be connected to supportive adults who care about them. Beyond the long-term outcomes, numerous reports from youth who have experienced institutional settings, government agencies, and advocacy groups have shown evidence of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and neglect in residential settings. Out-of-state placements also have less oversight and more disconnection from youth’s family and support systems. System involvement, placement in residential facilities, and related maltreatment are also disproportionately experienced by youth of color.  

In 2024, federal data reported that nationally 9 percent of children and youth ages 11-16, and 12 percent of youth age 17, who are in foster care are living in a residential or group setting. Although placements in residential settings have declined over time, they are still relied on by child welfare agencies. Recent reports from the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) highlight ongoing challenges states face placing youth with families in foster homes. In a 2024 report from the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO), states shared their challenges placing youth with families in homes: 

“Youth are sometimes placed in residential facilities due to an insufficient number of family foster homes, especially homes that are equipped to provide care for youth with mental or behavioral health needs. In 2015, we reported on the barriers to increasing the number of available family foster homes. One barrier was that states had insufficient time and resources to recruit and train additional foster families. Another barrier was a lack of community resources (such as therapy or mental or behavioral health services) needed to support youth in foster care. Certain youth in foster care are more often placed in a residential facility compared to others. For example, according to a child welfare organization that looked at data from 15 states from 2012 through 2019, older youth and teens are more often placed in residential facilities compared to younger youth. In addition, we reported in 2022 that youth of color and those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning, are overrepresented among residential facility placements.”

A 2026 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that many states continue to rely on congregate care despite the Family First Prevention Services Act’s limits on federal funding for these placements. Twenty-six of 49 states reported that their use of congregate care had not declined since the law took effect, and many states reported increasing their reliance on state or local funds to support these placements when appropriate foster family homes were unavailable. The report also highlights ongoing capacity challenges in family-based settings.

Caregivers, medical professionals and other stakeholders have also highlighted that some youth do need intensive psychiatric treatment and that ensuring that care is high quality and available when needed must be part of reforms aimed at addressing congregate care. Similarly, in testimony to the Senate Finance Committee, the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) described residential placements as “a small but important part of the full array of services” that serves to “provide specialized therapeutic services in a structured environment for children with special developmental, therapeutic, physical, or emotional needs.”

Lack of data makes it impossible to fully understand what is happening at residential placements, how young people in these settings are faring, and what policies and practices best support them. Lack of data also means it is difficult to hold leaders and facilities accountable for the experiences and outcomes of children under their care. 

Researchers studied challenges in implementing a certain type of residential placement known as Qualified Residential Treatment Programs or QRTPs. In speaking with groups of young people with lived experience, facility leaders, and child welfare agency leaders, they found that: 

 “All three groups acknowledged the need for and associated difficulty of data tracking and collection to demonstrate QRTP outcomes. Child welfare administrators reported challenges in tracking youth in QRTP for Title IV-E reimbursement and the focus on compliance undermining quality; young people believed that every facility should participate in tracking of quality care and accountability measures; QRTP leaders suggested performance-based financial models for QRTPs, as well as systems-oriented comprehensive reforms rather than focusing on QRTPs in isolation.” 

– Family First Implementation: A One-Year Review of State Progress in Reforming Congregate Care (American Academy of Pediatrics and Chapin Hall)

Implementation Example

While we wait for the federal guidance on data collection and oversight, it can be helpful to look at some of the ways states are collecting data and ensuring accountability in residential placements: 

• Utah passed legislation to increase oversight of residential treatment facilities in 2021.

• California passed a law to improve oversight and accountability of residential treatment facilities in 2024, with provisions taking effect in January 2026. That law requires CDSS to publicly post the information it collects on use of restraint and seclusion in facilities. 

• Florida has quality standards and annual accountability reports on residential group care.  

• Philadelphia has an Ombudsperson that specifically focuses on oversight for youth in residential placements. The city has also published performance standards for psychiatric residential treatment facilities.

• Idaho’s Ombudsman also receives and responds to complaints regarding youth facilities

Implementation Tips from the Advocacy Hub

While we await the federal guidance, you can take steps to understand the current data collection in your state, accountability measures that are in place, and what interagency partners are needed for implementing the new best practices when released. 

Review your state’s existing data. 

Find out what information your state already has available about residential placements and review it to learn how youth in these placements are doing. This can include quantitative data such as:

• Number of youth in in-state and out-of-state facilities;

• Demographics of youth placed (age, race and ethnicity, gender, etc.);

• Types of placements housing youth (i.e. percentage of you placed in nonprofit vs for profit facilities, small vs large facilities);

• Average distance from home youth are placed;

• Number of reported and substantiated maltreatment experiences (youth-youth and staff-youth);

• Number of injuries and deaths experienced;

• Number of oversight visits conducted by licensing agencies, and number and types of issues identified; and 

• Follow-up information collected and shared about responses/corrections to identified issues.

Also review qualitative data, such as reports sharing insights from youth who experienced these placements, findings from reports issued by Ombudsman’s offices, legislative staff, advocates, or other stakeholders, and any relevant news reports. 

Engage key stakeholders, including those who have experienced the system, to implement the new federal best practices. 

Building relationships with youth who have experienced residential settings, agency decision-makers, data analysts, and state leaders can help you jumpstart implementation of federal guidance, and ensure that implementation meets the needs of youth. For example, understanding the experiences of youth in residential treatment, by learning from youth and their families, will help you see where the new guidance can be leveraged to fill existing gaps. 

Engaging these groups and other relevant stakeholders to work together on an ongoing basis can help your state reduce residential placements while improving quality and oversight when RTFs are used.

These relationships and connections can help when the new data requirements are released, so you are ready to implement well, and add additional data points if your community decides they would be helpful.

Take action.

Once the legislatively-required HHS report is issued, all stakeholders can work with  child welfare and other relevant agencies to ensure the best practices it highlights are implemented in each state. 

Stakeholders can also start working towards better practice on residential placements today by gathering relevant local data and reviewing local and national recommendations on this issue (see above) and partnering to address the most pressing issues locally. 

• Both advocates and agency leaders can elevate the research showing the potential harms when residential programs are overused and underregulated, and can advocate to eliminate unnecessary placements and improve oversight and quality of facilities. 

• Service providers and other stakeholders can help identify gaps in the community’s continuum of care that may lead to unnecessary use of residential placements, and work with state agencies and community members to design and deliver needed programming. 

• •Young people who have experienced residential treatment facilities and their families can share their lived expertise to help identify needed changes, and help implement them effectively.  

Resources for Going Deeper

This section of the Supporting America’s Families Act creates a new grant opportunity for states to support incarcerated parents in building and sustaining their relationships with their children in foster care. These demonstration grants include activities and policy changes aimed at enhancing communication and visitation, and helping parents stay involved in their children's lives with activities that include child welfare case planning.

Overview of the Section 

Parental incarceration can sever essential relationships between children and their parents, causing long-term trauma and stress. Many children in foster care have a parent incarcerated – with one study estimating as many as 40% of children in foster care had experienced parental incarceration (compared to 6.4% of children not in care). This section of the Supporting America’s Families Act aims to promote strong relationships for the many children who are in foster care and have an incarcerated parent.  

 “…This bill also provides for new demonstration projects to promote meaningful relationships between foster youth and their incarcerated parents, powerful relationships that support both parents and youth.”

– Representative Danny Davis (IL-7)

The Act authorizes $35 million per year for federal fiscal years 2026 through 2029 for states to support relationships between children in foster care and their incarcerated parents. The authorized funding is for demonstration grants that are grounded in the best interests of the child and include:

• Changing child welfare and correctional facility policies to promote communication and visitation between incarcerated parents and children in care.

  • For child welfare agencies, this includes ensuring that parents are part of decision-making and case planning, receive appropriate information about their child and case, and have the ability to participate in services required by case plans and can demonstrate their relationship with their child as needed in connection with the case. 

  • For correctional facilities, this means policies allow for developmentally appropriate visitation opportunities, including physical contact and child appropriate visit times, locations, and security measures.   

• Facilitating meaningful visits between incarcerated parents and their children, including at least 9 in person visits per year, plus weekly communication. The law specifies that parents should be offered education to help with visits “to the extent practicable,” and that communication and visits should not be restricted as a correctional facility punishment.

• Offering appropriate training to child welfare, corrections, and other relevant program staff to help them understand how children and parents will benefit from meaningful connection.

• Providing incarcerated parents of children in foster care with case management services.

• Providing access to legal services for incarcerated parents of children in foster care (which may be paid for with grant funds if not otherwise federally reimbursable).

States may apply for these competitive demonstration grants if they have a partnership agreement signed by at least their child welfare and adult criminal justice agency. Other agencies may be included in the opportunity as well. The legislation includes information on how Tribes and Tribal organizations can lead and partner through this opportunity. 

The federal share for the grants can be up to 75% of total costs. States will also receive technical assistance from the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). HHS is also required to evaluate the programs and share findings with Congress. 

Provisions from Section 13 were adapted from the Promoting Active Relationships to Enable Nurturing Ties (PARENT) Act of 2024, introduced by Reps. Danny Davis (D-IL) and Darin LaHood (R-IL). 

Maintaining a Strong Bond Between Children and Incarcerated Parents Helps Both Children and Parents Thrive

Children and parents can both benefit from sustaining meaningful relationships when a parent is incarcerated. Safe and developmentally appropriate visitation can support this connection and help lessen the trauma associated with parental incarceration. Ensuring incarcerated parents have the support they need may also support reunification for child welfare-involved families. 

“I have observed so many benefits for children and parents in this program. Children who have been failing school begin to improve their grades. Grandmothers and mothers who had strained relationships begin to talk and reunite during the visits. Many of the children who participated have now gone on to college or the military, though they still ask to visit whenever they are home. Also, the impact on reunification and the ability for mothers and children to live together after the mother is released cannot be understated. The incarcerated participants have also had fewer disciplinary issues inside the prison, because they have family connections to motivate them” 

– Alexis Mansfield, senior advisor at the Women’s Justice Institute,Congressional testimony to House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Work and Welfare

In a research report from the Urban Institute, researchers found that visits that are conducted following best practices, can have positive impacts on children, parents, and their relationships. For example, “research indicates that parent-child visits are most beneficial when they allow for physical contact, are offered in a child-friendly setting, are part of a family strengthening program, and provide proper emotional preparation and debriefing before and after….Experts also find that physical contact and privacy during visits benefit both children and parents and help them cope emotionally and reconnect with each other.” 

However, visits can cause or exacerbate harm if best practices are not followed. For example, best practice includes considerations to safety risks, trauma impacts, and children’s expressed interests which can be identified through ongoing assessments. The Urban Institute's report explores research-based best practices for visit type, visit structure, and the frequency and length of visit, as well as several other visiting components. 

Implementation Example

The Justice Center at The Council of State Governments elevates the ways a number of states, tribes, and localities have supported the relationships between incarcerated parents and their children through federal grant programs, such as through mentoring, creating child-friendly spaces, and training corrections staff. They profile the work in several states, including Minnesota. 

In Minnesota, the Department of Health – as part of an effort to adopt model practices for incarcerated parents – created a learning community to help local jail facilities share implementation strategies and challenges. 

The overall goals of the Minnesota model jail learning community are:

(1) To establish a statewide network of jails to enhance and scale model jail practices that strengthen families until these practices become standard statewide;

(2) For children and families to increase the quantity and quality of parent-child interactions during and after incarceration; and

3) To improve the social, emotional, and mental wellbeing of children and youth with an incarcerated parent.

– Minnesota Department of Health

You can read about their current efforts – and watch a video featuring the parents, program coordinators, and community liaisons – on their website.

Implementation Tips from the Advocacy Hub

These core action steps can help build the blueprint for Title IV-B in states and communities. Read more about why we chose these steps in our intro to the series.

Review your state’s existing IV-B plan.

Every state has a Child and Family Services Plan that outlines the goals and vision for the child welfare system, along with the specific policies and practices they plan to use to achieve those goals.

Obtain your state’s plan (find it here, or from your state child welfare agency), and review for any references to parental incarceration and supporting relationships between incarcerated parents and their children in foster care, or more general supports that could be applied to this population (i.e., services to help families avoid termination of parental rights).

Get to know the current landscape of policies and practice.

Looking at the policies in your state that can promote or create barriers to relationships between parents experiencing both incarceration and child welfare involvement can help you identify areas that may be ripe for change. Here are some good places to start: 

• Review your state’s child welfare policy to learn what, if anything, is required for supporting visits and other ongoing contact between children in foster care and parents who are incarcerated. 

• Explore whether there are policies around reasonable efforts to reunify families or terminations of parental rights when parents are incarcerated. 

• Dig into state policy on the adult criminal justice system to understand any policies that support visits with children or if there are sentencing considerations for parents.

Beyond policy, learn about the existing service array – exploring visitation supports, training programs, case management, and access to legal services. Find out if any programs in your area support relationships between incarcerated parents and their children and whether they serve children in foster care. Learn more about what services community-based programs, as well as public child welfare and adult corrections agencies, offer and where there may be gaps. 

Review relevant data. 

Find out how many children in your state are involved in the child welfare system and have an incarcerated parent.

The Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (ACFARS) Dashboard can be filtered by state and shows the number of children and youth in foster care experiencing parental incarceration at the time they entered the foster care system. You can find the data by clicking on the “entries” dashboard box and selecting your state. Then select circumstances, and sort by family circumstances to see the number and percent of children who had an incarcerated parent at the time they entered care. Remember, the full population of children in foster care with an incarcerated parent will be larger than this number, since it only captures children for whom this information is known at the time of child welfare entry.

If programs already exist in your community to support children of incarcerated parents, learn more about who they serve, what outcomes they achieve, how they are funded, and what gaps or needs they’ve identified. 

Engage key stakeholders, including those who have experienced the system. 

Stakeholders including youth and families in your community, child welfare agency staff, and service providers can help you learn more about how current practices and policies limit or support healthy contact and strong relationships between children in foster care and their parents experiencing incarceration, as well as what changes or services are needed. 

In order to use the grant opportunity created by the Act, you will need to build relationships with the right leaders to apply for and implement a program. This includes child welfare leadership and corrections leadership, as well as youth and families who have experienced child welfare system involvement and parental incarceration. Experts have also suggested that reentry councils (such as those linked to the Second Chance Act) or service providers that help parents receive needed services while incarcerated and upon release (i.e., parenting education, housing assistance) can be valuable partners in this work.

As you partner with your child welfare agency, this resource from Casey Family Programs walks through a series of questions that agencies need to grapple with as they increase support for children with incarcerated parents. It includes questions on data collection, the historical connections between child welfare and prison systems, relationship strategies, and engagement supports. 

Take action.

Use the information collected in the previous steps to inform conversations with relevant stakeholders about whether your state should apply for the IV-B demonstration grant for children of incarcerated parents. You can also determine if there are ways to better support children with incarcerated parents, even if your state does not receive a grant, including whether there are other funding sources that could support this. Ensure that lived experts are part of your planning and implementation. 

Any policies or programs developed should reflect best practices from this field, including: 

• Youth should have choice and voice in how they are able to maintain relationships with their incarcerated parents, as age appropriate. 

• Make sure child welfare caseworkers engage incarcerated parents “early and often,” ensuring that staff training and policy, as well as creating needed interagency agreements, support this. 

• Child welfare and facility staff should take steps to ensure visits and other parent-child contact happens in ways that can support strong and healthy relationships, such as having caseworkers plan for visits by preparing and debriefing children and being familiar with the facilities’ policies. 

• Jails and prisons should create child-friendly visit spaces, adapt policies (including security measures) to be child-appropriate, and should offer in-facility parenting education to help parents be successful before, during, and after visits.

Resources for Going Deeper

This section of the Supporting America’s Families Act includes two important provisions. First, it broadens the definition of family preservation services to include nonrecurring “short-term benefits,” such as funds for housing, utilities, transportation, or food. Second, it adds a plan requirement instructing states to describe policies in place that prevent the separation of children from their parents due solely to poverty and ensure access to services.  

Overview of the Section 

A growing body of research, including work compiled by Chapin Hall, explores how meeting the concrete and economic needs of families can help keep children safely at home and reduce unnecessary child welfare involvement. This includes research showing how expanding public benefits or tax credits and providing cash or housing assistance can help stabilize families and in some cases, reduce child welfare system involvement. This research reinforces a growing recognition across the child welfare field that poverty alone should never be a reason for family separation. Research and practice also show how poverty, like maltreatment, is complex and interacts with multiple related factors, including mental health needs, substance use disorders, and domestic domestic violence. 

The Supporting America’s Families Act establishes that Title IV-B funding for family preservation services can now be used to meet non-recurring concrete needs (e.g., housing, transportation, utilities), tied to a crisis/event that could impact a family’s ability to keep their child in their home. Non-recurring means that these do not include ongoing needs, such as long-term monthly rent or car payments. Rather, these are “intended to meet a specific and immediate need or event affecting the ability of a child to remain at home and are defined in the PSSF program to include concerns related to utilities, housing instability, transportation, food assistance, and other basic needs.” You can read more about the specifics in this summary of the law from the Congressional Research Service.

The statute’s focus on non-recurring, short-term benefits reflects an effort to balance two policy goals that have gained increasing attention in recent years: preventing unnecessary family separation due to temporary economic hardship while also ensuring that  child welfare systems remain focused on child protection and can effectively connect families to other systems that offer broader economic supports when longer-term assistance is needed. 

This provision of the Supporting America’s Family Act was based on bipartisan legislation introduced by Ways and Means committee chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) and Ways and Means committee member Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI). In a public statement upon introducing H.R. 8813 (118th Congress), they expressed their intent:  

“Families experiencing a crisis and hard times should not have to worry about their children being taken from them. No child should be separated from their family solely because of poverty….This legislation will not only help states save money, such as Missouri which spends roughly $30,000 per year to have a child in foster care, but more importantly saves children and parents from the lifetime trauma created by separation.”

– Representative Jason Smith (MO-8), Ways and Means Committee Chairman

“The Preventing Child Welfare Entry Caused by Poverty Act builds on my ongoing efforts to redefine neglect in the child welfare system, so that families aren’t punished and separated solely for being poor.”

– Representative Gwen Moore (WI-4), Ways and Means Committee Member

Beyond broadening the types of family preservation services that are allowable expenses under IV-B, the Supporting America’s Families Act also establishes a new requirement for state plans and reporting. In most instances, by October 1, 2025, state Child and Family Services Plans (CFSPs) must describe what policies are in place to ensure children are not removed from homes based solely on poverty, including how case workers are trained to help in instances where there is a physical need connected to poverty. This new requirement provides an important opportunity for states to consider how their policies may be contributing to system involvement for families experiencing poverty, and to determine how their policies, practices, and service array could be improved to prevent unnecessary system involvement.

Provisions from Section 11 were originally included in the Preventing Child Welfare Entry Caused by Poverty Act, introduced by Representatives Jason Smith (R-MO) and Gwen Moore (D-WI). 

Meeting the Short-term Economic Needs of Families Can Reduce Maltreatment and Keep Families Safely tTogether 

There’s wide agreement that removing children from their homes solely because their families cannot afford housing, clothing, or other basic needs can cause unnecessary trauma to children and their loved ones. It can also strain child protective systems, limiting their capacity to respond effectively to children and families facing more complex challenges. A robust and growing set of research, compiled by Chapin Hall, shows how meeting the concrete and economic needs of families can keep children safe and reduce unnecessary child welfare involvement. 

The child welfare field - including state and local child welfare administrators, researchers, and practitioners - are increasingly working to understand and address the relationship between poverty and neglect. A clear body of research shows that families living in poverty are overrepresented in the child welfare system, especially in cases of neglect. Living in poverty is also connected to a myriad of other risk factors, including substance abuse, unmet mental health needs, and domestic violence, which are factors frequently associated with child welfare cases. State legislators are responding to this intersection by working to change their definitions of neglect to better balance child safety while ensuring a narrow definition of neglect. 

“Poverty and child neglect are highly correlated and often impact families simultaneously; but poverty does not cause neglect. Experts say it’s more complicated than that. Poverty produces material hardships for families. Such hardships often result in families experiencing toxic stress, which can impede children’s cognitive development and parents’ capacity to meet the needs of their children. Incapacity to provide is not the same as an unwillingness to provide. This distinction is at the crux of the challenge policymakers face to disentangle poverty from neglect”

– National Conference of State Legislatures 

Policymakers therefore face the dual challenge of ensuring families receive the economic and concrete supports they need, while also having appropriate services or interventions to address underlying risks to child safety.   

Implementation Example 

In a 2024 brief, Chapin Hall explored the ways that three states (Kentucky, Indiana, and Wisconsin) were able to leverage a constellation of state and federal funding sources, like Title IV-B, to implement programs designed to meet families’ concrete needs through funds for housing, clothes, transportation, child care, and many other material needs. 

In their brief, Chapin Hall elevates Kentucky’s Family Preservation and Reunification Services (FPRS), which includes financial resources to families for concrete supports. An evaluation showed great gains: “families who received FPRS were less likely to experience a subsequent substantiated referral within 6 months of ending services, and less likely to have their children enter out-of-home care after services ended, even though the families who received FPRS had higher cumulative risk factors.” Similarly, Wisconsin’s Targeted Safety Support Funds (TSSF) provides time-limited resources for families to address housing, transportation, child care, food, or clothing needs. 

Implementation Tips From the Advocacy Hub

These core action steps can help build the blueprint for Title IV-B in states and communities. Read more about why we chose these steps in our intro to the series.

Review your state’s existing IV-B plan.

Every state has a Child and Family Services Plan that outlines the goals and vision for the child welfare system, along with the specific policies and practices they plan to use to achieve those goals.

Obtain your state’s plan (find it here, or from your state child welfare agency), and review it to see how it addresses poverty and concrete needs for families involved with (or at risk of involvement) with the child welfare system. 

The National Association of Counsel for Children has suggested that attorneys advocate for specific examples of concrete needs to be included in their states’ IV-B plans and that they address concrete needs as part of “reasonable efforts” advocacy.

Get to know the current landscape of policies and practice.

Review your state’s legal definition of neglect [see here for 50-state review of child neglect law] and any relevant agency policy to determine how it impacts this issue. For example:

• Does it specifically exclude poverty as a reason for a finding of neglect? 

• Does it differentiate between intentional acts and circumstances beyond a parent’s control? 

• Does it specify any steps the agency must take if the circumstances of the neglect allegation are due solely to lack of housing, food, or other basic needs? 

Assess your state and local policy and practice around child welfare investigations and how the agency responds to a family experiencing poverty. What guidance do case workers, judges, and attorneys receive about poverty? How are financial challenges built into service plans or agency decision-making? 

Learn about any existing community and state-level efforts to provide the types of time-limited benefits that could be funded through IV-B. Talk to agency and program leaders to understand their current funding structure and opportunities for expanding the reach of existing efforts. 

Review relevant data. 

Find out how many children in your state are removed from their homes each year due to poverty, including lack of housing, food, or other basic needs. The new Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (ACFARS) Dashboard can be filtered by state and includes some relevant indicators (i.e., how many children were removed due to neglect, how many families were experiencing homelessness at the time of system entry), but your state child welfare agency may have more specific relevant data.

If programs already exist in your community to meet these needs for families involved with (or at risk of involvement with) child welfare systems, learn more about who they serve, what outcomes they achieve, how they are funded, and what gaps or needs they’ve identified. 

Learn from other sectors about the ways that flexible funding and other economic supports are already being used in your community. For example, flexible funds are being leveraged to address youth homelessness in Washington State (including for youth experiencing housing instability and legal system involvement) and across the country. 

Engage key stakeholders, including those who have experienced the system. 

Stakeholders including families in your community, child welfare agency staff, and service providers can help you learn more about how your state’s policies and practices may be driving families experiencing poverty into the child welfare system. They can also give you valuable information that can help you develop or expand a process for assisting families with concrete needs that will help them avoid unnecessary child welfare involvement.

Talk to families about their needs – make sure you talk to families with children of all different ages, in different geographic areas, with different cultures and customs. One source for good information is talking to families who are using Family Resource Centers. Family Resource Center leaders and staff will also have a good sense of community-level needs. 

Work with lived experts and agency leadership to understand how this new opportunity through the Supporting America’s Families Act could help fuel more comprehensive efforts to provide economic support to families. 

Take action.

Work with partners to rewrite policy as needed to ensure children are not removed from their homes solely due to poverty and to develop and deliver training for child welfare agency staff on this issue.

Collaborate on putting procedures and programs in place to ensure that every family who encounters child welfare systems is connected to needed concrete supports. This may involve tapping Title IV-B funds as well as braiding and blending other funding sources. 

You may need to leverage tested messages around the role that economic supports can play in safely reducing child welfare involvement. The Building Better Childhood Initiative has a free toolkit that provides messaging resources and graphics that may be helpful. 

Resources for Going Deeper

This section of the Supporting America’s Families Act requires states to provide an explanation for how they inform children, youth, parents, and caregivers about available legal representation in child welfare related cases.

Overview of the Section

Legal representation is critical for the children, youth, parents, and kinship caregivers who are involved in the child welfare system. Attorneys help these individuals understand their rights, participate meaningfully in court proceedings and have their perspectives considered in decisions that affect their lives. The Supporting America’s Families Act includes a new IV-B requirement – state Child and Family Services Plans must now include the process they use to inform those groups about available independent legal representation in a child abuse or neglect case, including dependency, adoption, guardianship, or termination of parental rights.

“With so much at stake in child protection proceedings, attorneys have a critical role to make sure that the voices of children and parents are heard, and their rights are protected. These attorneys can facilitate communication between parties and assist the courts to make informed decisions that prioritize the well-being of the child and family as a whole.”

– Representative Mary Gay Scanlon, PA-5

The new IV-B requirements in the Act are limited to states reporting on how they provide this information. As agencies implement this change, it opens the door to timely and important conversations about:

• who in the jurisdiction - children, youth, parents, or kinship caregivers - and under what circumstances, has a right to independent legal representation,

• whether the notice to children, youth, parents or kinship caregivers is sufficient in states where representation is available,

• if states are effectively using Title IV-E administrative funds to draw down federal matching for the costs of child, parent, kinship and tribal legal representation, and

• how gaps in the provision of legal representation can be filled in states that do not currently provide it.

Although this Explainer focuses primarily on the IV-B requirements of the Supporting America’s Families Act, you can find more information about best practices and opportunities to fund legal representation (through Title IV-E) in the Resources for Going Deeper section below. The Supporting America's Families Act creates a new requirement; however, Title IV-E already required and continues to require legal representation for abandoned infants (see 42 USC 622(b)8(B). 

Additionally, the Supporting America’s Families Act increased funds to the Court Improvement Program by nearly 33%, increasing the capacity of courts that hear child welfare cases. A forthcoming Explainer will provide more details on this section of the Act.

Provisions from Section 6 were adapted from the Ensuring Legal Representation for Child Welfare Act (Representatives Claudia Tenney (R-NY) and Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA)

Legal Representation Leads to Better Outcomes for Those Involved with the Child Welfare System – Including Parents, Children, and Kin

For children, youth, parents, kin, and other guardians or caretakers, involvement with the child welfare system is incredibly complicated and stressful. Navigating court hearings and legal requirements can be challenging – and many states have laws and policies in place to ensure that at least some of these individuals can access free or reduced-cost attorneys. Research shows that access to counsel helps children and families achieve permanency more quickly, increases kinship placement, ensures school stability, and generates cost savings for the public.

• Parents: In a journal article exploring the impact of legal representation for parents in child welfare proceedings, researchers found that providing parents with high-quality legal representation decreased entry rates into foster care and shortened the average time in care for those who were removed from their homes; reduced the time spent waiting for permanency; and led to cost savings for the government.

• Children and youth: The National Association of Counsel for Children summarizes the results of research showing the many positive impacts for children having legal representation. These include higher rates of exits to permanency, more individualized case plans and hearings, providing critical information to judges, and improving youth perceptions of their foster care experience.

• Other caregivers, including kin: When kin step in to care for a child, legal counsel can help them navigate the child welfare system and access key documents like birth certificates and public resources.

Cost savings associated with legal representation for children. A recent study conducted by an independent fiscal analyst found that “the estimated annual federal cost of providing legal representation is $1,009 per IV-E-eligible child, while the estimated annual savings from reduced time in care are between $4,393 and $8,238 per child, yielding a net federal benefit of $3,384 to $7,229 per represented IV-E-eligible child per year” and “estimated federal savings of between $67.96 million and $145.16 million per year.”

In addition, children and youth have reflected that access to high quality legal representation helps them have a voice in the important proceedings that impact their lives. For example, in 2020 The National Foster Care Youth & Alumni Policy Council released four priorities aimed at helping youth with foster care experience have a successful transition to adulthood. The value of access to high-quality legal representation, one of their chosen priorities, was described this way:

“High quality legal representation is important and necessary to ensure young people’s rights are protected and they have access to all appropriate resources. It can be daunting and intimidating for a young person in foster care to be at the table where decisions are being made about their life, especially without their own legal representative at the table….A legal representative can help youth understand legal documents, court orders and processes, and to voice the young person's needs by ensuring there is accountability for the decisions made in a young person’s life…As a child or teen, the system can be terrifying, scary and at times lonely. It is crucial for young people to have team members they know they can trust.”

Implementation Example

As your state gears up for implementation, the National Association of Counsel for Children (NACC), the ABA and the Youth Law Center developed a fact sheet and templates that states can use for notification of parents and children.

Creating and strengthening legal services for parents, youth, and caregivers needs to incorporate ideas and feedback from those who have experienced the system. To educate policymakers, professionals, attorneys and other partners about how to meaningfully engage parents, caregivers and youth, the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) hosted The Missing Piece: Courts Integrating Lived Expertise into Child Welfare System Improvement Virtual Summit. Check out the recording of the half-day summit, which included sessions on how to partner with lived experts and some of their strategies on system improvement.

Implementation Tips from the Advocacy Hub

Review your state’s existing IV-B plan.

Every state has a Child and Family Services Plan that outlines the goals and vision for the child welfare system, along with the specific policies and practices they plan to use to achieve those goals.

Obtain your state’s plan (find it here, or from your state child welfare agency), and review it to begin to understand what types of legal representation is available in your state and to whom.

Get to know the current landscape of policies, practice, and data.

In 2024, The Imprint reported that 31 states leveraged Title IV-E for legal services from 2018 -2023. The National Association of Counsel for Children (NACC) and American Bar Association (ABA) issued a complementary analysis with updated information. You can also review your state’s Child & Family Services Review Reports and/or Program Improvement Plan which may also contain information on legal representation. Look into whether your state provides legal representation, to what groups, and how much federal funding they have accessed.

The CIP data dashboard has a number of data points connected to legal representation of parents and children:

• Appointment of legal representation for parents requirements

• Staffing models (in-house, contract attorney, specialty offices) for parental representation and child representation

• Attorney standards of practice for parents and for children

• Percent of children who are appointed an attorney

Talk to your CIP and court leaders about other additional data points that may be available in your state or jurisdiction.

Engage key stakeholders, including those who have experienced the system.

This provision of the Act is focused on ensuring children, parents, and caregivers are made aware of what legal services are available to them. Because each of these groups has unique needs and positioning within the legal system, think about the best methods for consulting with each group separately. For example:

• Parents: Talk to parents who are involved in the child welfare system about when they were first aware of available legal representation. Was it when caseworkers first became involved? After a child was removed from their home? At their first court hearing? Ask when it would have been most helpful to have an attorney and how they would most like to receive information about how to access legal representation.

• Children and youth: Talk to young people about when and why they first accessed legal representation and how an attorney did, or could have, supported them in their case. Discuss what information they needed to understand the role legal representation could play and brainstorm strategies for getting that information to more children and youth.

• Caregivers: Ask caregivers about when they first became aware of available legal representation and how. You can probe into whether that was the most useful time in the case to learn about representation, or if notice at another time would have been more helpful. Try to talk to a diverse set of caregivers – including both kin and non-kin foster parents, as well caregivers who are serving as a prevention resource.

You can also talk to attorneys about how they connect to potential clients. In your state, judges may also play a key role in appointing attorneys for certain groups – so it may be important to talk with them about how they make those decisions.

Take action.

States are required to describe how they are complying with the Supporting America’s Families Act in their next annual report to the Children’s Bureau. Check with your state to make sure that they are accurately describing how children, parents, and caregivers are notified. NACC, the ABA and the Youth Law Center developed a fact sheet and templates that states can use for notification of parents and children.

If lived experts and other stakeholders have identified gaps or challenges in providing notice of available legal representation, work with your state to fill those gaps. Lived experts are key partners in developing outreach materials that describe resources in ways that are most meaningful to similarly situated parents, youth, and caregivers.

Resources for Going Deeper