Policy & Practice | Summer 2024
caregivers’ needs were greater than mine and their resources were more limited. 4 Family First and Relative Foster Care in Kentucky In the spring of 2019, Kentucky announced its new family service array. It put in place a more compre hensive array of services and within it there was relative foster care. 5 A few months after the implemen tation of relative foster care, I was speaking on kinship care at an event in a nearby town. The event was centered on the opioid epidemic and the goal was to educate people about the varying needs of those affected by it in their community. After the event,
thing or a bad thing.” Sadly, SB-29 did not pass, but I believe, in many ways, that it was still a success. More legisla tors and other key decisions makers knew what kinship care was and why it was important. Some may not realize that kinship caregivers take the children without the benefit of advance financial planning; it’s initiated pretty much at the start of a visit or phone call from a social worker. Often, grandparents worry that they will not have enough food, shelter, and other necessities for the rest of their lives, not only for them, but for their grandchildren as well. Statistics show that one in four grandparent-headed households expe riences food insecurity. 7
In 2014, I didn’t know that Kentucky was the leader in terms of the number of children in kinship care at 59,000— with 56,000 of those children living with grandparents. 3 I didn’t fully understand all the aspects of child abuse and neglect in Kentucky either, but as I reflect back on that time, I don’t know how I couldn’t have known. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that organizations can miss critical opportunities when they don’t involve people with lived experience at the conceptualizing stage of a project, especially for a child welfare project. Everyone wants an expert to consult with, who can lend information and validity to their work—having someone to help you build a solid foun dation at the start is key. As a person with lived experience, I am an expert on navigating and enduring the child welfare system. I am someone from the outside looking into the policies and tools. If given the opportunity, I bring candid truth to the reality of the system and I bring hope of what the future could be. My knowledge can’t be learned in a textbook but is learned in real life and in real time. Back in 2014, when my grandkids went to foster care, we never received a phone call about being an initial possible option. I found out about the situation the next day after they were already removed from their homes, as I had gone to pick up one of my grandchildren for a planned weekend trip. Later, my fear of how to get the children with us and all the other unknowns is what motivated me to learn as much as possible and to talk with many other caregivers like me. I quickly learned that other kinship
To help Margie and others like her, I needed to focus on the heart of the problem, which was the Kentucky kinship placement selection process and its form. While the form is created to help potential caregivers make decisions about placement, it is being presented during an extremely stressful time, without adequate opportunity to understand the options available to families. Even worse, the implications of selections made through this form are often perma nent, with no opportunity for kinship families to revise their selections. This policy has detrimental effects on families who, after becoming more familiar with their options and needs, do not have the opportunity to revise or appeal initial placement selections that had to be made so quickly. There
a grandmother named Margie spoke to me and asked me to help her. She had heard about relative foster care recently and needed to learn more. At this point, I had already spoken to thousands of other caregivers across Kentucky. In fact, a few years earlier I had led a petition and worked with my state senator on a kinship bill (SB-29) that would provide additional stipend for kinship families. 6 The kinship petition, with the help of outreach and coverage from the media, is why I believe legislators have such an understanding of kinship care families in Kentucky today. At one point, my state senator told me one thing for sure was that he knew for a fact that every legislator in Kentucky, including the governor, knew who I was. I remember thinking “I’m not sure if that is a good
Norma Hatfield is a grandmother raising two grandchildren. She is President of the Kinship Families Coalition of Kentucky and a Grand Voice with Generations United.
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