The Family Permanency Project
Did you know?
- 2,500 abused and neglected children live with uncertainty in DC’s child welfare system.
700 foster children are waiting to be adopted.
Hundreds of young people “age-out” of foster care each year without a family to provide them with the support and safety net to help them succeed.
Former foster children are significantly more susceptible as adults to be unemployed, homeless or incarcerated. Almost half do not complete high school and only half find stable employment. Many have ongoing special education, physical and emotional health needs, but often have difficulty accessing the services that can address these problems. Lacking family and other adult support that many teens take for granted, these youth face the challenges of adulthood alone.
What is the Family Permanency Project?
The Children’s Law Center (CLC) launched the Family Permanency Project (formerly called the Pro Bono Adoption Project) in 1997 to help give DC’s foster children permanent homes through adoption and guardianship. The project started as a partnership with two law firms and has grown into a partnership with several dozen of DC’s top law firms.
FPP is the only program in DC that provides free high quality legal assistance to foster parents, grandparents, and other relatives who wish to adopt or obtain guardianship or custody of children trapped in the child welfare system.
CLC’s Family Permanency Project believes that each child deserves a permanent loving family to help them feel safe, to grow – and to thrive. FPP believes that each child deserves a permanent loving family whose love and guidance can help heal the wounds of abandonment and neglect.
To increase the Family Permanency Project’s capacity to serve as many children as possible, CLC staff attorneys recruit, train and mentor volunteer attorneys from major law firms resulting in the donation of millions of dollars worth of legal services to create “forever families.” The generous support of our pro bono partners allows us to give more than a hundred children permanent families each year -- many more than our small staff could possibly handle. Our pro bono partners consistently report that our thorough intakes, well-organized referral mechanism, and the quality of our training and mentoring are reasons why they choose to take cases and partner with CLC. In 2006 we successfully partnered with hundreds of volunteer attorneys resulting in the donation of $5.1 million worth of legal services.
The cumulative result is safe, permanent homes
– a fundamental building block for successful childhood development –
for children who would otherwise be stuck in the foster care system.
CLC's representation of our clients goes beyond filling out adoption papers. We also secure an extensive array of support services - advocating for housing, special education services and public benefits - to provide the resources necessary to ensure that the new permanent family has the greatest chance for success. For example, children suffering from the trauma of sexual abuse receive counseling to begin the road to recovery, and children finally learn to read because we uncover undiagnosed learning disabilities and advocate for them to attend schools that can address their learning needs.
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