The FAMCare Blog

I have seen first hand how having the right human services software can really make a difference in kids’ lives. How kids that are in the system, for whatever reason, can get better treatment, better understanding and a chance to just be kids.

About a year ago, President Trump signed the Family First Prevention Service Act into law. Social workers engaged in child and family care praised the legislation as the first “prevention” measure to help keep children safely with their families and avoid the traumatic experience of entering foster care. The act emphasized the importance of children growing up in families and helps ensure children are placed in the least restrictive, most family-like setting appropriate to their special needs when foster care is needed.

A new resource guide is available that helps to keep our teens and youth safe.  If you'd like to grab a copy - you can get it here:  https://www.staysafe.org/teens/ 

A resource for finding Federal grants to fund youth programs has been shared with our team.  You can find information on the http://youth.gov website.

How we care for the most vulnerable among us is one of the great challenges of our time. As Mahatma Ghandi once said, “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” And social workers are hard-pressed to find one group in more dire need of urgent attention than children at risk of neglect or abuse.

Positive Tomorrows, an Oklahoma City non-profit, is opening a private school for homeless children that was designed by the kids themselves. That’s right. A private school for homeless (not privileged) children.

For those working in child services, an understanding of family situations is vital in being able to

help improve child welfare. Fortunately for those agencies, utilizing the right social services

software can help streamline processes and effectively “humanize” the various situations.

The goal is to always be improving child welfare through various services, responses and

interventions, and with the right social services software on your side, the tasks can become

easier to track and perhaps even more simple.

In the past twenty years, student debt has become a major social and political issue in our country. As government guaranteed student loans became more widely available, colleges began to raise their tuition rates to keep pace with the expansion boom that ready government financing created. More students required more professors and facilities to accommodate their needs, and colleges needed more money to pay for the growth. The result, of course, is that students borrowed more and more money to pay inflated tuition and fees and subsequently became burdened with overwhelming debt.

In a recent issue of Social Work Today, Kate Jackson reported this troubling statistic:

The Family First Act has become law! This is a very big deal for our caseworker colleagues who work in teen pregnancy and parenting. It represents the biggest change to the structure of federal child welfare finance since the establishment of the Title IV-E entitlement in 1980.