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ABA PERMANENCY PROJECTS
About the ABA Permanency Project
This award-winning project helps children move through the foster care system into permanency and helps states save foster care dollars.
Children in foster care need permanency quickly and safely. Children deserve to go home when it's safe -- but if they can't, then they must be provided with the most permanent home that meets their needs.
The ABA Permanency Project is helping states do this for their children. The ABA Permanency Project has been working for children for 18 years. It works, measured both in time and dollars. In New York and Pennsylvania, the project cut about 12 months from a child's stay in foster care and saved over $18 million dollars.
• Click here for New York and Pennsylvania results.
• Click here for the Pennsylvania start-up kit.
The Project is also in Kentucky and Wyoming. Project staffers encourage child welfare agencies, courts, attorneys and stakeholders to work toward ending barriers to permanence.
The ABA Permanency Project: Successful for 18 years
The Project has worked in over 30 small, medium, and large locations,
urban and rural, throughout the United States. It continues working
in new locations every year.
The ABA Permanency Project: Wins National Award
In 2005, the Project won the national Department of Health and
Human Services Adoption Excellence Award for its efforts in achieving
timely permanency for children.
Learning Trial Skills is Key to Success
Trial Skills for Child Welfare Attorneys is the ABA Center on Children and the Law’s "flagship" training program. This day-long program is ideal for attorneys in child welfare law who represent child welfare agencies, parents and children. The training helps provide attorneys with strategies in dependency cases that help children achieve a permanency goal more quickly. It helps the attorneys organize large caseloads and prepare for trial.
The training helps beginning and advanced attorneys expand their knowledge of the rules of evidence and their skills in examining and cross-examining witnesses. The course includes a mix of lectures, demonstrations, and mock trial exercises for participants. Each program is specially adapted for local practice and state law, and each participant leaves with continuing legal education credits--and a trial notebook to help them organize and prepare for their next case. For information on our trial skills program, please contact Anne Marie Lancour.
How the Permanency Project Works
The Project achieves positive permanency outcomes for children in foster care through system change. An ABA Project Director visits a county or region monthly for two years to develop procedures, tools, and skills, and deliver lasting solutions.
The ABA’s Permanency Project has a proven recipe for success. The Project helps each site go through five major tasks.
Experienced Attorneys Lead the Way
Adding years of expertise, Project staff have more than 165 years of experience in the child welfare system. Staff expertise includes agency, parent, and children’s attorneys, a retired dependency court judge, a child welfare policy analyst, a teacher, and a residential care social worker. Project staff (click here for staff bio information and shameless self promotion) specialize in helping counties find children the permanency they need.
Permanency Barriers Project Staff
Anne Marie
Lancour, JD, M.A.T.
Heidi Redlich
Epstein, JD, MSW
Mimi Laver,
JD
Andrea Khoury,
JD
Debra Jenkins,
JD
David Kelly,
JD, MA
Kathleen McNaught,
JD
Scott Trowbridge,
JD
Honorable Stephen Rideout, ret.
For more information regarding the center's state projects please contact Anne Marie Lancour for more information.
Looking For a Few Good States
Think your state might want to reduce the time children spend in foster care on their way to permanency? The ABA Permanency Project helps states save foster care dollars and gets children into homes more quickly. For more information please contact Anne Marie Lancour for more information.
