This report was developed with extensive input from LGBTQ+ young people currently or formerly in foster care, LGBTQ+ young people currently or formerly experiencing homelessness, and direct service workers. We identify how the pandemic is amplifying some of the risks for LGBTQ+ youth in child welfare systems and propose practices to mitigate them. Now, more than ever, LGBTQ+ young people must be protected.

A new report released by Children’s Rights and the Education Law Center-PA raises serious concerns about the safety of Pennsylvania’s residential placements for youth in foster care and the quality of education provided there. The report, Unsafe and Uneducated: Indifference to Dangers in Pennsylvania’s Residential Child Welfare Facilities, is available here.

Children’s Rights has proudly teamed up with Lambda Legal and the Center for the Study of Social Policy in conducting a groundbreaking study highlighting the deficiencies in law and policy across all 50 states in protecting transgender, gender expansive, and gender non-conforming youth in out-of-home care systems. The first-of-its-kind report showcases the dramatic overrepresentation of […]

Spurred by a child welfare reform campaign initially filed in 2000 by Children’s Rights, the state of Tennessee has employed a number of strategies over the years to dramatically reduce its reliance on institutions — and now placesthe vast majority of youth in foster care with relatives and foster families. This report not only explores […]

The state of Wisconsin recently launched a new effort to license and train relatives following a legislative change in 2009 requiring relatives caring for foster youth to apply for a foster home license. This report evaluates the implementation of this new policy shift in Wisconsin, and offers specific recommendations that would help ensure that foster […]

An in-depth report on the New York City child welfare system detailing problems that delay the progress of children in New York City foster care toward reunification with their parents, adoption, or permanency through legal guardianship — and making concrete recommendations about how these problems can be solved.

The first-ever nationwide, state-by-state calculation of the real cost of supporting children in foster care, revealing widespread deficiencies in reimbursement rates across the nation — and major disparities among the states — and proposing a new standard rate for each state to use in fulfilling the federal requirement to provide foster parents with payments to […]

A comprehensive assessment of the performance of the New York City child welfare system, revealing that despite a decade of reforms and improvements in the system’s infrastructure and in certain aspects of case practice, safety and permanency outcomes for many children and families have not significantly improved and, in some cases, have worsened.

A major initiative of Children’s Rights and the Children’s Defense Fund comprising three reports, several proposals for changes to federal policy, and ongoing outreach to federal legislators in support of improvements to the child welfare workforce nationwide. Related publications: Components of an Effective Child Welfare Workforce to Improve Outcomes for Children and Families (2006) List […]

A study of efforts to improve the child welfare workforce in the context of class action litigation in 12 states and localities across the nation, documenting the progress made and barriers encountered and providing a set of recommendations to guide current and future reform efforts.