Child and Youth Permanency Council of Canada - Conseil Canadien de la Permanence pour les Enfants et les Jeunes
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Mission Statement
The Adoption Council of Canada is Canada’s national voice for adoption, unifying communities’ commitments to permanency for waiting children and youth. We support and encourage people along their adoption journey, connecting them to the families and resources they need. Our vision is a permanent, supported family for every waiting child and youth in Canada. The mission of the ACC, while broadly serving the entire adoption community of adopted persons, birth families, and adoptive families, focuses on three main objectives: 1.) To raise awareness about the number of children and youth available for adoption in Canada’s child welfare system, and to facilitate programs that will promote the placement of vulnerable waiting children and youth in permanent, loving, culturally competent families. 2.) To connect with provincial adoption agencies and organizations and support them in our common goals, by assisting them in communicating with different levels of government and the private sector about their specific provincial challenges. 3.) To recognize and promote the need for post-adoption supports for all members of the adoption community. The ACC strongly believes that education, communication and connection to medical, social, psychological and educational resources are essential in ensuring the success and longevity of adoptive family relationships.
About This Cause
As Canada’s only national, non-profit, charitable organization serving adopted persons, adoptive families, and birth families, we are focused on the need to raise awareness about the approximately 30,000 children and youth in government care across Canada who need permanent families (through kinship care, customary care, legal guardianship and adoption). We also facilitate programs that promote the placement of waiting children and youth in permanent, safe, loving and culturally competent families. *the Adoption Council of Canada is not an adoption agency. The programs that the ACC manage are as follows: - Canada's Waiting Children and Youth: Canada's Waiting Children and Youth website promotes the placement of waiting children and youth in permanent, safe, loving and culturally competent families. CWCY is the only national child-specific photo listing program in Canada, and only available to Canadian residents. The focus of CWCY is to find permanent families for older children and youth and those living with visible or invisible disabilities, including those related to developmental trauma. As part of this program, we connect provincial/territorial departments and child welfare agencies to support the placement of children and youth in permanent adoptive family relationships. The children and youth profiled on CWCY are currently in the care of provincial and territorial child welfare agencies across Canada, or are youth who have connected with the ACC directly to create their own profiles. The agencies are responsible for sending us the profiles and pictures of children they believe would benefit from this service. No identifying information of anyone profiled on CWCY is publicly accessible. Aging Out Without a Safety Net: Approximately 30,000 children and youth in foster and group care in Canada are currently available for adoption; approximately half of those are girls/young women, and half of those are Indigenous and African-Canadian. The majority of these girls will age out of the child welfare system without a permanent family. Lacking a connection to a permanent family is the root cause of economic insecurity for young women aging out of the child welfare system in Canada, affecting their economic insecurity for the rest of their lives. Other barriers include homelessness, incarceration, visible and invisible dis(abilities), a lack of education, poverty, violence against women, human trafficking, teen parenting, addiction and mental health issues. Our three-year project is intended to strengthen partnerships between organizations that work with young women who age out of the child welfare system in the areas of housing, justice, mental health, addictions, trafficking, education and maternal health and to encourage them to share solutions and best practices, with each other and with policy-makers. The ACC will conduct focus groups with young women who have aged out of the child welfare system in Iqaluit, Edmonton, Ottawa, Montreal and Moncton. The focus groups will include members of the ACC’s Youth Speak Out groups, and will also include any young women identified by partner agencies. Our partner agencies include but are not limited to: Youth In Care Canada, the Elizabeth Fry Society, The Centre for Addictions and Mental Health, A Way Home, The Homeless Hub, the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and Covenant House. In Spring 2021, the ACC will hold a Symposium with provincial/territorial and federal policy makers, national partners, and young women who have aged out of care to review progress to date on identifying barriers, and to share best practices of policies that support these young women, and to identify ways to collaborate on future policy development to ameliorate system barriers. The Adoption Council of Canada sees a strong connection between the number of young women that we fail to find permanent families for while they are in the child welfare system, and the problems they experience when they age out of are and into economic security. This project will track that connection, and we hope to use our finding to make recommendations that will dismantle these barriers. Best Practices Recruitment: The Adoption Council of Canada's Best Practices workshop provides training for prospective adoptive parents, foster parents, adoptive parents, social workers, and other child welfare professionals. Training is given to support the best interests and needs of the children and youth currently living in the child welfare system, particularly those living with visible and invisible disabilities. This hands-on workshop includes the following topics (and can be customized for the audience): - Support in writing strengths-based profiles for children and youth; - Recruitment strategies for finding foster and adoptive parent(s); - Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD); - Openness in adoption; - Attachment; - Developmental trauma; - Cultural competency, and; - A local Youth Speak Out team will provide participants with their lived experiences about what works and where improvements can be made in the child welfare system. Stories of [Be]longing - Digital Storytelling: Stories of [Be]Longing is a digital storytelling project that works with youth in and from the child welfare system to share their experiences via short films. The filmmakers, aged 12-30, create three-minute films about their experiences in foster care, or with their birth families, with customary care, adoption, kinship care, or aging out of care. Digital storytelling combines the oral tradition of storytelling with the visual and sound capabilities of digital media. In adoption and child welfare practices, digital storytelling is a particularly good tool because it is creative, accessible, and fun. You can use digital storytelling with all age groups. We primarily work with youth and young adults from 12 to 30, but we're also beginning to work with adoptive parents and social workers. Creating digital stories engages and builds an emotional connection with youth, and with the audiences to which they show the films. For the youth, it's also a healing process. Everyone who makes a story gets a copy of it, and can share it as they choose. Digital storytelling is a form of narrative therapy. It helps participants build a connection with each other, as they make the films, and with their audiences, as they show them. Creating these stories harnesses the power of the arts to bolster wellness. Led by youth themselves, the project enables them to develop practical recording, writing, editing and presentation skills. At the same time, participants develop emotional and advocacy tools. They decide if they want to show their stories publicly, who they want to show their stories to, and how they want to use them. Many youth decide they want to show their stories to make changes to the child welfare system. In the workshops where children and youth have created these digital stories to illustrate messages about their need to belong, the importance of permanency, and what it's like to grow up in the child welfare system, they also learn to use personal stories to explore identity and social inclusion. Journey Home: an interactive bus tour, Journey Home educates community members and leaders about some of the most vulnerable children and youth in their community. Policy and decision-makers, social workers, business people, educators, foster/adoptive parents, members of the justice system, community leaders and- most important – youth in and from care – can participate in a five-hour bus tour that simulates the experience of a child or youth’s time in care. After boarding the bus, participants receive a profile of a child they ‘become’ for the day. Passengers are asked to imagine themselves as that child as they proceed through the journey of care to different stops/locations around the city. At each stop along the journey, participants hear directly from a youth about their experience in care, suggestions about how best to support them, and ways to dismantle barriers to permanency. Passengers also hear from experts in the field and learn about the importance of their work for children and youth in/from the child welfare system. At the end of the day, passengers learn whether the child they have imagined themselves to be returns to their birth family, is adopted, remains in foster care, or ages out of the system without a family. Journey Home is a youth-led, adult-supported program. We hope it will inspire youth, including those with visible/invisible disabilities, to become a part of and to change the conversation around what it means to come into or grow up in the child welfare system. Youth in/from care share their experiences and recommendations for change, showcasing their resiliency, their talents and their strength. They develop leadership, presentation and public speaking skills. Youth participants, as well as Journey Home passengers, learn about the intersectional and interdependent issues that children and youth from care face, including the way time in the child welfare system affects mental health, homelessness, school graduation rates, and contact with the justice system. Journey Home showcases the strengths of the child welfare system as well as illustrates systemic challenges. We hope the project promotes greater empathy and understanding of how the child welfare system works. In every community, often unknowingly, people encounter children and youth who live in foster or group care, or who have spent time in the child welfare system.