March 17, 2022
For nearly a decade child advocates and child welfare providers have pushed to align our state child welfare financing with the goal of strengthening families and reducing the number of children and youth placed in foster care. This year, we are poised to realize significant investments in meeting families’ needs outside of the child welfare system with a ground-breaking commitment to universal child care, as well as support to continue reducing the number of children in foster care.
The Senate and Assembly One House Budget bills build on the Executive Budget proposal in several long-overdue and important ways to strengthen families:
As the budget negotiation process proceeds, we look forward to working with elected leaders to ensure funding restorations for prevention services at 65% county reimbursement, that KinGap is funded independently to support more kinship caregivers, funding is added to support increased adoption subsidy and foster parent rates, and that robust investments in the workforce ultimately are in the adopted budget.