For Social - 27th
HALOS, in collaboration with Generations United and the South Carolina Department of Social Services, today shared a vital new tool for kinship caregivers. Kinship caregivers are grandparents or relatives raising children who cannot live with their parents.
The Adoption and Guardianship Comparison Chart is a valuable tool that empowers kinship foster parents to evaluate and compare adoption and guardianship as effective options for exiting the foster care system and creating permanent families in South Carolina.
South Carolina has spent recent years building a strong kin-first culture in its approach to child and family services, and clear pathways to family permanency are critical to the success of that effort. For most kinship caregivers, guardianship or adoption represents the safest, most stable option for long-term success, but the differences between these legal statuses are critical to understand.
“HALOS celebrates this new tool, which will be used by our Family Advocates when assisting families to navigate complex decisions about the future,” said Jed Dews, HALOS’ Executive Director.
The full resource may be downloaded here: https://www.gu.org/app/
Kinship families are also encouraged to visit the SC DSS website for additional resources: https://dss.sc.gov/child-well-
ABOUT HALOS
HALOS serves kinship families in the Charleston region. Kinship care occurs when a child cannot be with their parents and an adult with a relationship to the child steps in to raise the child. Kinship caregivers are grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, older siblings, neighbors, teachers, and family friends who don’t want to see a child they care about enter the foster care system.so they volunteer to take in the child themselves.
There are 57,000 children in kinship care in South Carolina compared to less than 4,000 in formal foster care. Because kinship caregivers typically are not licensed foster parents, they do not receive any financial assistance for caring for the children.