Family Urgent Response System for Foster Youth and Caregivers
CWDA has partnered with CH1LDREN NOW and the County Behavioral Health Directors Association to co-sponsor a budget proposal to provide children and families with the support they need to be successful and increase placement stability for children and youth in foster care. Assemblymember Dr. Joaquin Arambula is the legislative sponsor for this budget item and the author of the corresponding bill, AB 2043.
Family Urgent Response for Foster Youth and Caregivers gives families access to immediate intervention services, through telephone support and in-person mobile response, to help children and their caregivers develop strong and healthy relationships, even in challenging situations. This approach will also decrease avoidable calls to law enforcement and ensure fewer contacts between system-involved youth and the criminal justice system.
Family Urgent Response will help to ensure foster families receive the immediate support they need and allow foster children to heal and thrive in homes and not institutions.
Family Urgent Response System Would:
- Establish a statewide toll-free hotline available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week to caregivers and children and youth in the foster care system who are experiencing emotional, behavioral or other difficulties and need immediate help. The statewide hotline would be staffed with operators trained in conflict resolution and de-escalation who will provide immediate assistance over the phone to help defuse the conflict or crisis, and will triage the situation to determine whether mobile, in-home support is needed.
- Require counties’ child welfare and behavioral health agencies to establish mobile response teams to provide face-to-face, in-home response on a 24/7 basis to help defuse and stabilize a situation, assess the caregiver’s and child’s needs, and develop a plan of action. Counties would be expected to provide the family with needed ongoing services through the existing local network of care service systems.
Read why more than 500 organizations support Family Urgent Response