|
Home > Post-Legal Adoption Services for Children with Special Needs and Their Families: Challenges and Lessons Learned > Common Challenges/Promising Strategies
Post-Legal Adoption Services For Children with Special Needs and Their Families : Challenges and Lessons Learned
Grantee Lessons Learned
Author(s): Child Welfare Information Gateway
|
| Year Published: 2005 |
2. Common Challenges/Promising Strategies
Grantees experienced a number of common challenges associated with attracting and engaging adoptive families, presenting trainings to community service providers, recruiting and retaining qualified staff and volunteers, and sustaining the programs beyond the grant period. Details of these challenges and the strategies programs used or recommended to overcome them follow.
2.1 Engaging Adoptive Families
Grantees faced ongoing challenges engaging adoptive families of children with special needs in services. Families tended not to participate regularly in support groups and activities, but to move in and out as their needs changed. Grantees reported families were more likely to make contact once they were in a state of crisis, seeming to believe that seeking help before that point would be a sign of failure. Several projects also served large geographic areas where extensive travel time (1 to 2 hours each way) was required for many families who wished to participate in groups.
Engagement methods grantees used (many of which were found to improve participation) included:
- Conducting extensive outreach. Most projects found it necessary to continue outreach activities throughout the project in order to have sufficient participation, particularly with support groups. Outreach activities included mailings to adoptive parents; public service announcements; information booths at community events; and presentations to adoption staff, parent groups, home study groups, professional conferences, local churches, community centers, and fraternities and sororities.
- Reducing the travel burden. To address the hardship of extensive travel for families, at least two programs began meeting with families in their own neighborhoods. One project also recruited local facilitators for neighborhood groups from among the adoptive parents who lived in the community.
- Offering "perks." Families seemed to respond positively to the provision of food at the group meetings, especially when they were held in the evenings after a long day at work. Some projects also provided childcare, usually by scheduling children's and teens' group meetings at the same time as the parent group meetings.
- Offering education. Several projects offered training sessions and presentations on specific areas of childhood development to ensure that parents left each session feeling they had gained at least one "tool" that would help them in their day-to-day parenting. They found that adoptive families were more willing to seek knowledge than they were to seek help. One project changed from monthly weekday evening meetings of about 2 hours to quarterly day-long Saturday meetings with an educational component for parents and for children.
- Offering recreation and social activities. Grantees reported that recreational and social activities provided non-threatening entry points into post-adoption support programs. Families who participated in these services were more likely to seek help earlier when challenges arose, before the family was in a state of crisis.
- Supporting families who cannot participate in groups. Several programs found newsletters and websites were effective in building a community among adoptive families who did not participate in group activities. These tools served as non-threatening ways to address concerns, provide families with education and information in their homes, show them that other families shared their challenges, and help them locate help when needed. One project provided a chat room with regularly scheduled weekly support chats or visits from adoption experts.
2.2 Training Providers
While grantees recognized that offering adoption training to community service providers was one of the most effective ways to support adoptive families of children with special needs, doing so was not without its challenges. Providers frequently had difficulty getting time off from work for the training. Staff who had adoption expertise often did not have the time to become trainers. Many providers simply were not interested in or did not recognize the need for adoption-specific training.
Efforts to address these issues included:
- Being flexible. Some grantees tried offering training on Saturdays, so providers would not have to miss work. Unfortunately, this did not meet with a great deal of success. In most cases providers were even more reluctant to give up a Saturday than they had been to miss a workday to attend. It was also more difficult to recruit trainers for Saturday sessions. Others tried shortening the sessions and offering them to professional groups on-site.
- Offering credit. Some grantees recommended that future projects investigate getting the classes certified for CEUs as an incentive for providers to participate.
- Offering compensation. Another recommendation was to budget funds to make it possible to offer stipends for professionals who work fee-for-service and cannot afford to miss days of work to attend adoption-specific training.
2.3 Recruiting and Retaining Qualified Staff
The projects were unable to offer competitive salaries, particularly for Master's-level social workers. As a result, recruitment was difficult and many of the programs experienced extensive staff turnover.
Strategies used to improve staff recruitment and retention included:
- Offering incentives. Grantees offered employees flexible work schedules and educational opportunities.
- Hiring staff with experience. Hiring staff with adoption experience and a genuine commitment to the field was another strategy that met with limited success.
Retaining staff remained a challenge throughout the life of the grant in a number of cases, resulting in recommendations that future post-adoption programs budget for more competitive salaries.
2.4 Recruiting and Retaining Volunteers
A number of grantees used volunteers, primarily to serve as mentors for adopted children and youth. While recruitment seemed generally successful, many potential volunteers dropped out between the initial expression of interest and the orientation meeting, or between orientation and the first training session. Barriers grantees noted included the level of commitment required and delays in processing background checks and scheduling training.
Projects developed several strategies for dealing with this:
- Casting a wide net. Some of the recruitment methods grantees mentioned included mailings, local radio talk shows, and volunteer fairs.
- Targeting the right groups. Several programs began targeting their recruitment efforts to young professionals, college students, and others who may have more time and availability for the commitments.
- Offering more timely training. Some grantees provided training in small groups or even individualized sessions so recruits would not have to wait as long.
- Recruiting for specific children. Several projects recruited using a list of specific children who needed mentors.
Grantees reported that potential volunteers seemed generally more likely to step forward for a specific child rather than for a program. When responding to the needs of a particular child, prospective volunteers also seemed more willing to wait a reasonable length of time for the screening and training requirements to be met.
2.5 Sustaining Programs
Locating ongoing local or State funding for these preventive programs was difficult. Only four projects were able to continue providing direct services once the grants ended.
- In one case, the State child welfare agency recognized the program's excellent work and provided funding to continue the project.
- One project committed to continuing services on a limited basis, using funding from State reimbursement for finalized adoptions and private fundraising events.
- A third project had not received or identified additional funding, but committed to continuing limited services through a volunteer effort.
- A private family services agency that had been a collaborator and a direct service provider in one of the projects decided to continue to provide all post-adoption services that were provided during the project.
The remaining 11 projects were unable to continue their post-adoption services on a formal basis. Grantees were quick to point out, however, that continuation of a project's activities is not the only way to measure its impact on the community. For example, the providers who participated in adoption-competence training ideally retain an increased sensitivity to and comfort level in dealing with the adoption issues that families and their children bring to them. Many of the parent support groups started through these projects continued to meet after funding ended. Resource guides, lending libraries, websites, and
newsletters developed with these funds continue to be available to adoptive families, prospective adoptive families, and providers.
This material may be freely reproduced and distributed. However, when doing so, please credit Child Welfare Information Gateway.
|
RSS
Email
Order (Free)
Print (PDF 318 KB)
Share
Rate This
