Plummer Youth Promise

Our goal is to connect children and teens across all our Foster Care settings (residential care, community apartments, foster care families, Intensive Permanency Services (IPS)) with permanent, unconditionally committed, forever families. Through our permanency work we aim to help youth to either go home by reunifying children with family safely and as quickly as possible or find home by engaging new family relationships forever committed to the child.\n\nTo achieve that goal, we need to accomplish three objectives:\n1. Help make sure that young people in our care achieve safe, stable, emotionally secure parenting relationships;\n2. Use data and data analysis to better understand the most impactful interventions that achieve the best outcomes for our youth; and, \n3. Increase the number and strength of connections to family for each youth in our residential and foster care programs.

We employ our Intervention and Outcome Model (Permanency, Preparedness, and Community) across direct service programs that serve as many as 200 young people each year. These include Residential Care, Foster Family Care, and Intensive Permanency Services (IPS).\n\nThe permanency element of our model includes a variety of clinical approaches and three nationally recognized\nbest practices:\n\n1. Family Search and Engagement: At the core of our promise to youth is a commitment to find a permanent, forever family. Often this means reconnecting with birth family or relatives; sometimes it means finding a new family. When there is no biological family able to provide that relationship, we recruit new families. \n\n2. Youth-Guided, Family-Driven Teaming: Youth voice and active participation is critical in planning for a young person\u0027s family relationships and future. We build a team around each youth, prioritizing parents, relatives, and other caring adults and driving the process toward a family outcome. Our teaming approach includes key professionals and addresses all areas of youth safety, permanency, and wellbeing. \n\n3. Permanency Readiness: Addressing readiness for permanency from both the youth\u0027s and the family\u0027s perspectives and developing a plan that includes informal and formal supports, is essential to preventing a future re-entry to the child welfare system. We help youth clarify past events, experiences and relationships, preparing them to live with and/or be part of a lifelong family. We also prepare the adults to safely parent and/or sustain family relationships by helping them understand the impact of trauma and access the needed services and supports.

Our innovative approach to ensure every youth has access to \u0022permanency\u0022 (someone unconditionally committed to nurture, protect, and guide them to successful adulthood) has gained national attention and become a model for similar social services agencies. As such, Plummer shares best practices with partners through training, coaching, and consultation. \n\nThrough our direct service permanency work, we focus on building or rebuilding family relationships that young people will be able to count on after they leave the foster care system; but our scope of work expands well beyond the walls of our residential care facilities and foster families. Given the success of our\napproach and measurable impact in our own direct services, we continue to be asked to provide consultation with other organizations to increase their capacity. \n\nIn 2016, Department of Children \u0026 Families (DCF) offices contracted Plummer to support them in particularly difficult cases with young people who seemed to be stuck in the system and were living in non-Plummer programs. We began supporting four young people; in FY20, we served 68 and currently have a waiting list.\nThrough this program, we are improving the prospects for these youth while simultaneously modeling effective practices for the staff of those programs. In 2016, we also added the Permanency Practice Leadership Division, that provides coaching, training, and consultation to other foster care providers, allowing us to reach youth beyond our own care. In FY20, we trained more than 2,000 child welfare professionals across the nation, including staff at more than 50 well-known organizations including The Home for Little Wanderers and the Justice Resource Institute. \n\nPlummer Youth Promise is a founding member of the MA Permanency Practice Alliance (MPPA). The MPPA is a collaboration of organizations committed to improving permanency practice within their respective agencies to better serve the children of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

In FY20, 167 youth received our specialized permanency services and 90 discharged from our care. Of the 90, 73% discharged to a safe, stable, emotionally secure parenting relationship. As members of a forever family, these young people now face a more positive future avoiding the typical grim outcomes of homelessness, unemployment, early parenting or lack of education.\n\nIt is worth noting that many of the young people served were teens who would otherwise have aged out of care without a family. The average age of these youth was 14 and they had been living in the foster care system for nearly 7 years. One-hundred percent of participating youth reported they felt they were receiving the services they needed and 90 percent of youth agreed that Plummer\u2019s permanency services were helping them.