Respond to Away From Home

• Review the entire Away From Home project
• Read the Away From Home report
• Buy the Away From Home book
• Watch the National Readout
• Learn about we centered lived experience in the methodology of Away From Home
• Read Sixto Cancel’s Op Ed in the New York Times about why and how we must eliminate group homes

• Use the Discussion Guide to have a conversation about Away From Home and eliminating institutions.
• Form a discussion group and use the Discussion Guide to facilitate a conversation with your colleagues, family, or friends. 
• Share Away From Home on social media.
• Host a Table Talk by gathering people with lived experiences in institutions and facilitating them to engage in a conversation together, in public.
• Read the recent Op Ed by Connecticut’s Commissioner Vannessa Dorantes, and consider writing an Op Ed to your local paper about ending group homes.
• Contact your local, state or federal policymakers about ending institutionalized placements in foster care.

Placement

• Ask youth where they want to live and do everything possible to make that a reality.
• Place youth with kin right away whenever possible.
• At entry into foster care and continually ask youth who their connections are and if there. is a person who could be considered for placement.
• Do everything possible to provide the support and services needed to make youths’ desired placement safe and possible
• Reduce bureaucratic barriers
• Expand the definition of kin
• Improve licensing for kinship placements
• Provide emotional and financial support to kinship placement providers.
• Incentivize states to license kin in the same way it incentivizes adoptions.
• Incentivize licensing and recruitment of Black, Brown and Indigenous foster families to ensure youth can maintain cultural permanency.
• Prioritize placements for youth in their school district of origin, that fluently speaks their language, and ideally shares other demographic characteristics like religion.
  

Prevention

• Become a mentor or other volunteer at a community-based foster care prevention program in your area.
• In every step of every engagement, ask yourself: How can we do this differently to provide the resources and support necessary for families to remain together?.
• For youth who can safely return home and want to, home is the best alternative.
  

Prioritize

• Prioritize people with lived experience in the research, design, and implementation of policy changes.
• Learn about we centered lived experience in the methodology of Away From Home and develop strategies to better center lived experience in your work. 
• As institutional placements are reduced, accommodate the preferences of youth in the transition.
• In cases where child welfare is not providing a safer alternative and youth want to return home, the system must provide an ironclad, scrutinized justification for keeping youth from home.