Keeping children in stable homes starts with supporting the families who care for them.

Thanks to $1.265M grant from The Duke Endowment, Foster Family Alliance of NC is partnering with Chapin Hall to strengthen foster family retention across North Carolina for the next three years.

BUNCOMBE COUNTY, N.C. (WLOS) — Buncombe County has partnered with the Foster Family Alliance (FFA) of North Carolina to shorten the time children spend in foster care.

The FFA is a North Carolina-based non-profit, providing training and support to foster families.

NONPROFIT AND BLUE CROSS TEAM UP TO AID FOSTER KIDS IN WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA

Buncombe County Health and Human Services (DSS) is partnering with the nonprofit Foster Family Alliance (FFA) of North Carolina to address long-standing challenges in recruiting, training and retaining foster, kinship and adoptive families.

The goal of the contract, which runs through Tuesday, June 30, is to reduce delays, prevent families from dropping out of the system and shorten the time children spend waiting in foster care for permanent, stable homes, says FFA Executive Director Gaile Osborne, who lives in Buncombe County and has fostered more than 30 children.

After years of pleading from the child welfare community, the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services recently rolled out a Medicaid plan that’s designed to simplify care for children and young adults in the child welfare system — a population that state officials say has long struggled to navigate a fragmented health care landscape.

About 32,000 children in foster care and former foster youth were automatically enrolled in the state’s Children and Families Specialty Plan when it launched on Dec. 1. Among other things, the program aims to prevent disruptions in services for children who had been receiving care in a different county before they entered the foster system.

North Carolina’s foster care system is seeing a sharp decline in foster homes — and that means more children could go without holiday gifts. The Foster Family Alliance of North Carolina hopes to change that with its “Holiday Hope” toy drive, supporting more than 1,000 foster kids this season. Gaile Osborne, Executive Director of the Foster Family Alliance of NC, talks with Jon Champion to explain how the community can make a difference.

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Back-to-school season is supposed to mean excitement: new teachers, new goals and the comfort of reuniting with classmates. But for too many foster youth, it means stepping into yet another unfamiliar classroom — often after being moved to a new placement.