The Foster Parent Recruitment partnerships brings our comprehensive toolkit to include diligent recruitment, child specific recruitment, targeted recruitment, and general recruitment. Also covered are partner marketing strategies, foster parent referral programs, customer service best practices, measuring outcomes and metrics, and reporting data. 

Better foster home recruitment leads to better placements leads to improved permanency and this, in turn, leads to significantly better lifetime outcomes. Our team can best assist your team to meet your goals and improve your outcomes. Foster home recruitment, especially for therapeutic, emergency and specialized foster care, has proven to be among the most difficult of recruitment and our team can supplement your team’s expertise and success.

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“As foster parent recruiters, we are the bridge between those who want to become licensed parents and the agencies who license them. In our experience over the last decade in Illinois we have determined that recruiters at foster home licensing agencies have little formal training in diligent recruitment, child specific recruitment, targeted recruitment as well as diversity, equity and inclusion and how it relates to foster parent recruitment. To arm a foster parent recruiter with necessary education is to empower them to masterfully be experts. To that end, as foster home recruiters, we have created a Foster Home Recruitment Certificate Program to educate recruiters, allowing them to be impactful and create beautiful outcomes for youth of all ages in foster care.”

Susan McConnell
Founder and Executive Director of Let It Be Us
susanmcconnell@letitbeus.org
847-528-2044

• The #1 goal is permanency. Improved permanency is one of the top goals of every child welfare agency in Illinois, yet permanency rates for youth in Illinois foster care are extremely low, if not the lowest. 
• Permanency is seen as a positive, long-term outcome for youth in foster care. Lifetime outcomes for youth in foster care can be extremely negative if youth are not placed in the proper foster home, which ties back to foster home recruitment.
• While foster care is intended to be temporary, it often consumes childhoods.

•  Foster care introduces lifelong impacts and outcomes such as disproportionate level of early pregnancy, lack of education, lack of employment, incarceration, homelessness and often a combination of those outcomes.
• By improving the quality of the recruited foster families, permanency is improved and the historic and systemic negative impacts above are reduced.
• Foster Parent Recruiters are typically educated in social work and their work experience is also primarily in social work. Reimagining the role of Foster Parent Recruiters being filled by those with recruitment experience and/or lived foster care experience is the innovation.
  Introducing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) to the recruitment process is implemented by designing partnerships with communities that match the youth in foster care; the Black community, the Hispanic community, the LGBTQ community, the retired community (experienced parents), the younger community, and the single communities.
• A shortage of foster homes, and a shortage of the right kind of foster homes, can lead to an overreliance on congregate-care settings (such as group homes) for children and youth. What has become normalized leads to decreased educational attainment, according to the Annie E Casey Foundation.
• A shortage of foster families can lead to an overreliance on congregate-care settings (such as a group home or institution) for children and youth. What has become normalized leads to decreased permanency and educational attainment, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. And according to the Illinois Statewide Foster Care Advisory Council, as is found in their meeting minutes, there is an extreme lack of foster homes in Illinois. Further, according to the same minutes from the Illinois Statewide Foster Care Advisory Council, agencies are declining cases because they do not have any open foster homes.

“As foster parent recruiters, we are the bridge between those who want to become licensed parents and the agencies who license them. In our experience over the last decade in Illinois we have determined that recruiters at foster home licensing agencies have little formal training in diligent recruitment, child specific recruitment, targeted recruitment as well as diversity, equity and inclusion and how it relates to foster parent recruitment. To arm a foster parent recruiter with necessary education is to empower them to masterfully be experts. To that end, as foster home recruiters, we have created a Foster Home Recruitment Certificate Program to educate recruiters, allowing them to be impactful and create beautiful outcomes for youth of all ages in foster care.”

Susan McConnell
Founder and Executive Director of Let It Be Us
susanmcconnell@letitbeus.org
847-528-2044