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Helping Families Stay Connected
CFR's Visiting Project
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Since 2003, CFR has made Improving visiting for children in foster care a central priority.
Five years later, CFR can point to numerous improvements in frontline practice and in city policy.
What was once "innovative" is now becoming "routine" in visiting practice, resulting in benefits for untold
numbers of families due to CFR's persistence in assuring that every professional who works with children in
foster care makes visiting a priority.
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Victory for Visit Hosts
CFR is proud to announce the successful achievement of one of its central policy objectives:
In June of 2007, Commissioner John Mattingly of the City's Administration for Children's Services (ACS)
issued "Visit Host Guidelines: Bridges Back Home." The guidelines provide direction to the city's
more than 40 foster care agencies on how to recruit and train Visit Hosts to support families separated by
foster care. They were developed over an 18-month period by a citywide task force co-chaired by
CFR's Deputy Director, Michele Cortese. The task force included professionals from ACS, foster
care agencies, parents, lawyers, and family court staff.
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Other Victories for the CFR Visiting Project:
- CFR's Visit Host work will be featured at the New York State 2008 Summer Judicial Seminars for Family
Court judges from around the state.
- CFR is the only legal services agency that has been invited to join the ACS Parenting Education
Workgroup to develop guidelines in 2008 and 2009 focusing family visits to teach parents effective ways to
engage with their children.
- CFR staff have worked with law guardians, ACS attorneys, and foster care workers to achieve enhanced
visiting opportunities for over 130 families CFR represents involved with family court.
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Why we continue to remain Vigilant
about Visiting
When families are separated by foster care, Family Visits are the most important
opportunities for members to stay connected while parents work to regaining health and stability.
Family visits permit children to stay close to parents and extended family, help parents learn healthier ways
to interact with their children, and enable families to address much of the pain, disappointment, and mistrust
that often results when children feel their parents have not taken good care of them.
Child welfare experts find that frequent visits for children with their parents and other loved ones help
children cope with the anxiety and confusion of foster care. Experts also note that the more visits
parents have with their children, the more likely they are to stay engaged in the services they need to parent
in a safe, healthy way.
Unfortunately, in New York City, the combination of state law, city policy, and inadequate visiting resources
at foster care agencies meant that some children only see their parents for one or two hours every two weeks--,
about one to two days a year.
Most family visits still occur in cramped, sterile agency offices, and foster care workers often report that
they don't have the resources to arrange visits around activities that truly mimic normal family life.
For younger children, this might mean playing in the park, attending a pediatrician's appointment, reading before
a nap. For older children it might mean doing homework, cooking together, shopping for clothes.
Thanks to the generous support of the Ira W. DeCamp Foundation, the Child Welfare Fund, the New York State Bar
Association Fund, and numerous private donations, CFR will continue to find new ways to be leaders and agents
for change in the area of family visiting.
For information on training and technical assistance, contact CFR at
info@cfrny.org.
For Visiting Toolkit, click here.
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