Collaborative Approaches to Adoption for Children with Complex Needs

The Children's Bureau will fund projects that will test and build evidence for collaborative approaches to improving permanency through adoption for children and youth with complex or high-acuity needs, such as medically fragile children. The projects will focus on system-level efforts to recruit, train, support, and retain families who can meet these children's behavioral, medical, or emotional needs. 

Researchers and child welfare program staff will implement and evaluate promising collaborative approaches to achieving stable, permanent adoptive homes for children and youth with complex or high-acuity behavioral, medical, or emotional needs.

Collaborative approaches must include strategies to recruit, train, support, and retain specialized adoptive homes equipped to meet the needs of children and youth with complex or high-acuity needs. These approaches may also include a variety of additional strategies, such as specialized interventions for children and families; support services and respite care for families; training for caseworkers; collaborative, community-based services; and coordination with state and local health and education agencies. Of particular interest are collaborations that include Medicaid Section 1115 Research and Demonstration Projects to support potential adoptive families, including foster and kinship caregivers who may be interested in adoption, as well as collaborations that include private adoption agencies.

Award recipients will be expected to study how the model works in practice (i.e., implementation study) and evaluate the effectiveness of the approach, using the most rigorous research designs, methods, and analytic techniques that are appropriate and sufficient to address the research questions of interest. Applicants will be required to submit a strong theory of change to guide all aspects of implementation and the research design.