News
California Permanency for Youth Project (CPYP)
By: Stacie Buchanan, Division Manager
In the fall of 2005, Contra Costa County Children and Family Services became one of thirteen California county child welfare agencies to join the California Permanency for Youth Project (CPYP). CPYP started in January 2003 as a result of a five-year grant awarded by the Stuart Foundation. This grant has since been extended through 2009.
The vision of this project is to achieve permanency for older children and youth in California so that no youth leaves foster care without a lifelong connection to a caring adult. “Permanency” is both a process and a result that includes involvement of the youth as participants or leaders in finding a permanent connection with at least one committed adult who provides: a safe, stable and secure parenting relationship; love; unconditional commitment; and lifelong support in which the youth has the opportunity to maintain contacts with important persons including brothers and sisters.
Children and Family Services embraced the opportunity to participate in CPYP because, even with excellent Independent Living Skills services offered to older youth in our county, emancipating foster youth often have difficulty finding employment and have high rates of homelessness, imprisonment and reliance on public assistance. Other youth often come to the attention of the public mental health system – not having a permanent connection and stable support system can increase depression, anxiety and other emotional problems both before and after emancipation from the child welfare system.
The primary goal of our county’s CPYP two-year effort is to establish “permanency” for 10-15 youth served by our West County office. These young people, many now estranged from their parents and families, have recently been selected to participate in the project. The CPYP grant is now providing social workers with intensive training from nationally known youth permanency expert, Kevin Campbell.
One foundation of working toward permanence is empowering a wide range of individuals to participate in permanency planning, including current and past caregivers and birth family members. The first instruction given by Kevin was to find the adults who love or could love these young people. Often current and former foster parents are the first adults the youth identifies as the people who love them. The next step for the social workers will be involving these loved ones in the permanency process. Current and former foster parents will be asked to participate in permanency planning efforts. This typically includes participation in the Team Decision Making (TDM) meetings and coordination with Independent Living Skills staff.
Children and Family Services hopes to rely on the permanency expertise gained by these selected youth, their caregivers, family members, and social workers to implement training and social work practices throughout our county to insure permanency for all of our older youth.
If you have any questions about the California Permanency for Youth Project, please contact Stacie Buchanan, Division Manager, at (510) 231-8101 or visit the CPYP website at www.cpyp.org.
From Contra Costa County Foster Families Newsletter, May/June 2006