It Takes a CHILDREN'S Village

A very very good story. It reminds me of the SOS Villages a friend in Austria told me about many years ago, and how it WORKS!  Trace

Marcella Gilbert organizes Lakota cultural activities and provides respite care for parents at the Children’s Village operated by Simply Smiles in La Plant, South Dakota. Bryan Nurnberger, president and founder of the nonprofit, serves as interim director of the foster care village. (Arielle Zionts / KHN)

It Takes a Village: Foster Program Is a New Model of Care for Indigenous Children

By Arielle Zionts February 14, 2023

LA PLANT, S.D. — Past a gravel road lined with old white wooden buildings is a new, 8-acre village dotted with colorful houses, tepees, and a sweat lodge.

The Simply Smiles Children’s Village, in this small town on the Cheyenne River Reservation, is home to a program aimed at improving outcomes and reducing trauma for Indigenous foster children.

All foster programs seek to safely reunite children with their families. The Children’s Village goes further.

“We want to make Lakota citizens of the world,” said Colt Combellick, who oversees mental health programs at the village. “If we can help them relearn their culture and their heritage and connect them to the resources that they need to thrive moving forward, we’re going to try to make that happen.”

The program is an example of the growing nationwide effort to improve services for Indigenous children, after generations were routinely traumatized by being separated from their families and cultures. While the Indian boarding school era is over, and improvements have been made to child welfare systems, Indigenous families remain overrepresented in the foster care system.

Simply Smiles, a nonprofit organization, aims to improve Indigenous foster care by keeping children in their tribal community instead of placing them in foster families away from the reservation. It has hired trained professionals whose full-time job is to care for children in a village setting that provides cultural programming and mental health services.

“We actually have research that shows that kids who have stronger cultural identity have better child well-being outcomes” such as succeeding in school and avoiding drugs, said Angelique Day, an associate professor at the University of Washington and an expert on Indigenous child welfare.

Day, who is not affiliated with Simply Smiles, said she’s excited by any innovative program aimed at improving child welfare in tribal communities if it provides adequate training so foster parents can support the children and avoid turnover. She said it’s also important for organizations to arrange for independent evaluation of kids’ progress after leaving foster programs.

It’s too early to say whether Simply Smiles will succeed in its goals, but the Children’s Village has the support of the leaders of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and has attracted interest and visits from officials representing Indigenous nations across the country.

SOS Villages: Keeping Kids Together | Historic Healing Tour

We have posted about SOS Villages... you can search for it on this blog. - TLH, Blog Editor

GOOD NEWS👇👇👇

New Homes in Southern California Will Keep Siblings in Foster Care Together

By Nancy Marie Spears

The city of Palmdale, California is moving forward on a housing project that keeps siblings in foster care housed together. Photo by Annie Spratt via unsplash.com.

If children must enter foster care while their parents sort out mental health crises, violent relationships or addiction, the trauma of abuse and neglect, and the pain of separation can be long-lasting. But there’s one clear way to minimize the impact: keeping siblings together.

Public officials in a high-desert bedroom community north of downtown Los Angeles have committed to building housing that facilitates those critical family ties. Within a year, according to local and county officials, the city of Palmdale will be the first site in California to begin construction of a development built specifically for sibling groups in foster care. 

The aim of these temporary homes and the staff who will oversee them, said Mike Miller, director of neighborhood services for the city of Palmdale, is to get the children safely back to their families once problems at home have been sorted out. 

“They’re helping the children, but they’re also working with the parents because ultimately I think our wish for all foster kids and parents is that this family stays together,” he said. “These aren’t kids just getting thrown into a home somewhere,” he added. “This is also about valuing the family, and keeping the kids together. That’s transformational.”

The $19 million project will include a dozen three-bedroom townhomes.  Up to six siblings will live in each home, together with a specially trained professional caregiver. The housing project will also include two units for young adults transitioning out of foster care, and offices for case managers and support staff.

Last week, in accordance with its goal of creating “quality affordable housing” for “low, very low and extremely low-income” residents, the Palmdale City Council and Housing Authority authorized a $1.2 million “acquisition and pre-development” loan for the project. The Los Angeles County Development Authority has also committed to a $500,000 loan, with the remaining costs covered by private financing, according to a city staff report.

The project, which will be constructed on the north side of McAdam Park on 30th St. East in Palmdale, is being developed by SOS Children’s Villages. The more than 70-year-old agency describes its aim as building families for orphaned, abandoned and other vulnerable children in 135 countries, including the United States.

SOS Children’s Villages is now a global organization, but it began humbly, its first “village” built in 1949 in Imst, Austria to house children left behind during World War II. The group now operates more than 550 “villages” serving approximately 13 million children, youth and families. 

Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger

Palmdale will be the first location of its type to open in California, but the developer of the site runs three similar housing projects in Illinois, and one in Florida.

“I’m a proud supporter and funder of the SOS Children’s Villages project in Palmdale,” L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger said in an email to The Imprint, adding that she met with the project’s leadership at length. “I’m impressed by their long-standing commitment to family reunification efforts, and to providing compassionate care to foster youth and those at risk of entering the system.” 

Keeping siblings together

The hazards of failing to keep siblings in foster care are widely acknowledged, and “placing siblings in the same home should always be the priority,” states a 2019 federal Children’s Bureau bulletin.

Although the relationships can be expansive in definition — biological siblings, step siblings, foster siblings, or other close relatives or nonrelatives with whom they have lived, even siblings they’ve never met — maintaining an attachment is essential to the children’s well-being.

“For some siblings in care,” the bulletin says, “their separation or infrequent visiting can cause those relationships to wither, sometimes to the point of permanent estrangement.”

When foster children stay close to their siblings, they are more likely to remain in stable homes, and more likely to “achieve permanency” through family reunification, adoption or legal guardianship. The pairing of siblings helps them adapt to new living situations, whatever they may be, in part because they are less worried about where their other family members are and how they are doing.

Researchers have also found that contact with brothers and sisters soothes the trauma of childhood abuse and neglect, as well as the traumatic experience of being separated from parents and the only home a child has ever known. Children who have positive relationships with siblings are less likely to suffer behavioral problems, such as anxiety and depression.

For siblings who can’t be housed together, child welfare experts encourage close placement, frequent visits and ongoing contact through letters, email, social media, cards and phone calls.

Numerous federal laws aim to promote sibling connections.

The Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 was the first federal law stressing the importance of sibling relationships in the foster care system. It requires that any child welfare agency relying on federal funding to seek placements that keep siblings in the same home or, if that’s not possible, provide ongoing contact and visits.

In 2014, the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act required that the parents of siblings be included as people to be notified when a child needs placement, as a means to keep children within extended kin networks. 

Four years later, the Family First Prevention Services Act passed, allowing states to waive the number of children who can be placed in a single foster home, as a way to better accommodate sibling groups.

Changing the profile of Antelope Valley

The region known as the Antelope Valley — which includes the cities of Palmdale and Lancaster — has some of the highest poverty and child maltreatment rates in Los Angeles County. Three horrific and highly publicized child deaths in the area over a six-year period put the child welfare agency’s delayed response to household warning signs under a harsh spotlight. The area has also experienced a relatively high level of turnover among social workers and CPS line staff.

Referring to the torture and killing of 8-year-old Gabriel Fernandez in 2013 — crimes committed by his mother and her boyfriend — Miller said the tragedy also spurred action.

“It really heightened our community to tell us that we need to do more,” he said. “And the community’s really stuck to that promise of trying to do more for the kids. So this SOS project is just right on that path of commitment that came as a result of that tragedy.”

Miller said the sibling housing project will take some time to complete, given the complexity of the project’s funders, agencies involved and unique requirements. But he expects construction will begin within a year.

“These projects really do take time but this one just strikes to the heart and it has such momentum and support,” Miller said. “What we’re hoping is that this is a model that other government entities here in California will use to do the exact same thing up and down the state.”

Tim McCormick, CEO of the SOS Children’s Villages Illinois, got esoteric in describing the project. He said it’s meaningful that the site will be located in the high desert, and the architecture will be environmentally friendly and reflect the region’s natural colors and hues.

“There’s really an intrinsic beauty of life out there,” McCormick said. “It’s kind of a hidden gem.”

McCormick also noted that the sibling groups who will live at the site more than likely will have come from impoverished households. But once built, their temporary home will serve as a resource center for these low-income children and families. It will also nourish cultural life, with an outdoor theater for the arts, music and spoken word — “almost like a Greek auditorium,” McCormick described. “So that’s what we hope to do there, is to bring in resources that are outside Palmdale and inside Palmdale, to blend them together and create and strengthen a narrative of a child’s life and a family’s history.”

SOURCE: https://imprintnews.org/child-welfare-2/homes-in-california-will-keep-siblings-in-foster-care-together/66575

 

ALSO READ:

Opened in 1871 by Quaker missionaries, Riverside is the nation’s oldest boarding school operated by the federal government.  It is one of the 408 across the U.S. identified in Haaland’s recently launched Federal Boarding School Initiative — described by the Department of the Interior as the government’s first comprehensive attempt “to shed light on the troubled history of Federal Indian boarding school policies and their legacy for Indigenous Peoples.” 

Haaland has pledged to document the schools’ troubled pasts, address their intergenerational impact and fully account for the trauma they inflicted throughout Indian Country. 

READ :  https://imprintnews.org/child-welfare-2/historic-healing-tour-honors-survivors-indian-boarding-schools/66367

Reinventing a better world for all children

By Trace Hentz (adoptee-author)

Years ago doing research for my memoir, I spoke with a friend in Austria who told me about SOS VILLAGES. I had never heard of this or such a concept. It's so good it has spread to the US. READ HERE

We know that in Indian Country, taking children and placing them in adoptive homes was to assimilate them, erase them from tribal rolls, an act of genocide motivated by greed and for the taking of more land. We can't change the past in North America. It has already taken place. We are the survivors, the adoptees, left to cure ourselves but also to see to it that this doesn't happen to more children.

In 2015, I will say this: the adoption industry is like a very large building that employs thousands (if not millions) of people -- real people who collect a paycheck. They are lawyers, judges and social workers.  History shows us that children needed more than an orphange and thus began the system we have today - tiers of bureaucracy, unregulated agencies rife with corruption and kickbacks, the trafficking of children internationally to meet the supply and demand here in the US and even the black-marketing of babies. Read about one evil baby trafficker here.

We have to invent something better here in the US. We can't change what exists. We have to replace it and make the old adoption system obsolete!

If ONE TRIBE could make this happen and do this SOS VILLAGE concept in 2015, the word would spread and children would be saved. Children would not lose their tribe, culture or language. Isn't that the purpose and the reason for adoption - saving children's lives?

If someone wants my help to create this new reality in Indian Country, email me.

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READ THIS: The New Abolition: Ending Adoption in Our Time | Daniel Ibn Zayd | August 18th, 2012

I invoke this term fully aware of its weight as concerns the movement to abolish slavery, and to clarify this usage I define adoption as follows:

Adoption is, in and of itself, a violence based in inequality. It is candy-coated, marketed, and packaged to seemingly concern families and children, but it is an economically and politically incentivized crime. It stems culturally and historically from the “peculiar institution” of Anglo-Saxon indentured servitude and not family creation. It is not universal and is not considered valid by most communal cultures. It is a treating of symptoms and not of disease. It is a negation of families and an annihilation of communities not imbued with any notion of humanity due to the adoptive culture’s inscribed bias concerning race, class, and human relevancy.