Children In Foster Care: Societal and Financial Costs

Children in Foster Care
Societal and Financial Costs

A Family For Every Child (AFFEC) is dedicated to find loving,
permanent families for every waiting foster child. While the heart
understands the importance of family, a clear calculation of the
societal and financial costs incurred when children languish in foster
care adds to the sense of urgency and the importance of success in
realizing our mission. This report aims to highlight the costs to the
foster child and to society when children are not adopted or reunited
with family members.
The analysis in this report shows that A Family For Every Child
(AFFEC) works as an effective investment in promoting the team
effort it takes to place children into permanent families.

Amanda Fixsen M.S.

Interested Parties,
While it is intuitive that finding permanent families for waiting foster children results in financial
savings to the public, to define those saving is much more difficult. It was clear that in order for A Family
For Every Child (AFFEC) to make meaningful appeal for operational funding, we would need to present
credible, valid measures of the savings we help facilitate. No such measures currently exist, and so we set
about creating them.
After considerable investigation and outreach, we struck a conversation with Dr. Katharine Cahn,
Ph.D., Executive Director of the Center for Improvement of Child and Family Services at Portland State
University’s School of Social Work. Dr. Cahn immediately grasped the need for and complexity of the task
we framed. She referred us to the research consultation services of Mrs. Amanda Fixsen, M.S., Social Work
and Social Research Doctoral Candidate at Portland State University. In the spring of 2011, Mrs. Fixsen and
we set about that task, and several months later Mrs. Fixsen delivered the report which follows.
This is a developing, iterative process. We fully expect levels of precision with the data to improve
over time, as many of the measures make sense only after forward-going-basis data collection points and
systems are created, compiled, vetted and placed into meaningful context.
Literally everything A Family For Every Child (AFFEC) does is geared toward moving foster children
into life-long permanency with adoptive families. All our programs were designed to fill in cracks in the
pavement on the roadway toward permanency. It is reasonable to expect us to develop new programs and
to expand or amend existing programs as new or changed conditions present. Accordingly, we anticipate an
accompanying need for us to expand and refine our data collection, processing and publication as
conditions dictate in the future.

The Board of Directors
A Family For Every Child
November, 2011