By Jennifer Fernandez
The first thing Genevieve Traversy does when she takes in a new foster child is show them where the food is.
“Most children that come into foster care are food insecure. I know I was,” said Traversy, who was in foster care as a child and now works with foster children and families as a social worker for Lutheran Services Carolinas. “I make sure that they know — that’s the food. And I just try to be the parent that I wish I always had.”
Making the child feel comfortable and safe is important, she said.
Traversy spent most of her childhood in and out of foster care. From the time she was a 3-year-old until she aged out at 18, Traversy lived with 16 different families.
The majority of them were strangers. One placement was with what is sometimes called “fictive” kin — nonrelatives who have a close, emotional tie to the child. And two of her foster placements were with family members, something known as kinship care.
“I am a big advocate for kinship [care], because I know how important it is for families to stay together,” Traversy said.
North Carolina has also woken up to the importance of keeping children with relatives as much as possible after a child is removed from a home due to allegations of abuse or neglect. For the past few years, the state has been moving toward a kin-first foster care model.
As part of that change, the state changed long-standing policy and began paying unlicensed kinship caregivers in late 2023. The number of people who took in a juvenile family member increased nearly 16 percent from 2023 to 2025, according to state data analyzed by NC Health News.
National data has shown that keeping children with family members when they come into foster care often provides better outcomes. Their academic performance either stays the same or improves, their cultural identity is preserved and they show better behavioral development and mental health.
“When they are placed with the relatives and there are good supports put in place for those kinship caregivers, these children are pretty stable in their placement,” Adrian Daye, section chief for permanency in the Division of Social Services for North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services, told NC Health News last year.
Kinship care rises by Jennifer Fernandez
Reaching more families
Gaile Osborne, who founded the nonprofit Foster Family Alliance of NC, has been a foster parent for 16 years. For years — she estimates about a decade — she said she didn’t hear anything about kinship care.
Now it is a major focus in the child welfare system.
Kinship placements are often in the same community, meaning children may not have to change schools. In traditional foster care, they may be shipped to another county or even moved across the state.
Children in kinship care typically lose fewer connections, and it is one less transition they have to make, Osborne said.
“The longer that we can keep them connected to their families, the better off these children are going to be,” she said.
Last year, more than 6,500 children were placed in kinship care across North Carolina at some point. The vast majority of those relatives were unlicensed providers.
Data provided by NC DHHS shows that the number of children in at least one unlicensed kinship/relative living arrangement rose by 10.2 percent from 2023 to 2025, after the state started to pay unlicensed kinship caregivers.
This growth is also reflected in families that are licensed kinship caregivers. There were 219 people licensed for kinship care in 2020, and there were 254 in 2025. And the number of children in licensed kinship care has ballooned from 41 to 583 during that same period.
In the first year, 2024, that families were paid for unlicensed care, the number of children placed with kin jumped, so that an additional 548 children lived with family members. In the three previous years, the numbers fluctuated but were not as dramatic.
Daye said traditional foster families typically have had the time to plan for taking in a child. They’ve talked about it with the household and their support networks.
“But for kinship, those placements happen pretty abruptly, and so there’s not a lot of time for them to prepare for things that they need,” Daye said.
More resources for families
The unlicensed kinship payment provides some support for family members who take in a child to navigate what Daye said is a complicated child welfare system. Also, the hope is that eventually the families will become licensed kinship caregivers, which comes with special training to help families adjust to taking care of a relative.The number of family caregivers converting from unlicensed to licensed is growing, now that there are more kinship placements.
There’s an economic incentive for that conversion: Licensed kinship caregivers receive $702 per month for every child 5 years old or younger. Nonlicensed kinship caregivers are paid $351 per child each month.
In an effort to make kinship care an easier option than it has been, the state health department has provided training to county child welfare staff on finding and engaging family members, and about what kind of support they might need.
Some counties have had greater success than others with the transition to a kin-first approach — even without grants or extra money to do it, Daye said.
“This is something that they truly believe in, and the directors and the counties have supported them in these efforts,” Daye said.
For example, Osborne said a Buncombe County social worker told her they are “banging down those doors Day 1,” before the child even comes into DSS custody, to find potential family caregivers.
Counties have responded positively to the unlicensed kinship payments, with the state picking up half of the tab, Daye said. Some counties were already offering monthly payments to unlicensed kinship caregivers, so now their costs are lower.
“The social workers also see the importance of kinship caregivers and what that means for the children who are in foster care,” Daye said.
Traversy called North Carolina’s kinship care efforts “a good start.”
Giving families some money to take care of a child relative is helpful, she said. Reducing the amount of training they need to become licensed also helps encourage families to take in a child they weren’t expecting, she said.
“I think that they need a lot more support and a lot more resources,” Traversy said. “I think we’re getting there slowly but surely.”
Early adopter of kinship care
In California, Los Angeles County began focusing on family-first foster care two decades ago. Today, nearly half of children who are in foster care are with relatives or fictive kin, according to data county officials shared with NC Health News.
“Children thrive in a familiar environment, and that familiar environment comes from someone they know that might … share the same history, culture, traditions, values, food,” said Allana Darter, an assistant regional administrator with the Family Finding and Engagement Program in the Los Angeles County Department of Child and Family Services.
The county’s legacy of kinship care started in 2004 with the Permanency Partners Program, which worked with children or youth who had been in foster care for some time with little to no family connection, Darter said. Their aim was to reconnect these children and youth with family.
The success of that program helped lead to Upfront Finding Family, which moved the search for relatives or close friends earlier in the process, Darter said.
The Los Angeles County program starts with a referral, followed by a search of multiple databases to look for family members or fictive kin. A form letter is sent to anyone identified in that search with contact information for the social worker in that case.
Sometimes it’s quite a revelation that a relative has been placed in care, Darter said.
“We’ll talk to them about whether they’re interested or willing or able to provide any form of support to this child, and what would that support look like,” Darter said. “So we try and not focus on placement when we have these conversations, because that’s a big conversation, it’s a big commitment. And there’s so many ways that someone can support, we don’t want them to think that … they’re not worth being involved unless they provide a placement. That’s not the message we want to carry.”
Support comes in many forms, from calling the child or sending birthday presents to helping with homework or taking them for a few days for a break. Sometimes that support is helping a parent who took in their niece or nephew.
One grandfather wanted to continue to walk his grandchild to school, Darter said.
Improvements needed
As North Carolina emphasizes kinship care, officials need to remember that kinship foster families need the same support and resources that traditional foster families receive, Traversy and Osborne said.
Foster parents are eligible for respite care, which is someone who takes in the children for a period of time to give the foster parents a break. Kinship families don’t get that support.
There are summer camps for foster children. But what about those in kinship care or who have been adopted?
“Once a child is adopted, [that] doesn’t mean trauma stops,” Traversy said. “It doesn’t mean any of those needs stop. You still need that support, those resources.”
Daye would love to have a kinship navigator program similar to what is used in Ohio.
The Ohio model provides kin caregivers with concrete supports, like a bed or car seat — whatever they need to help them take care of a child relative. There are support groups, and each family is assigned a kinship navigator to help them find resources and navigate the system.
Osborne has seen kinship families struggle. There are a lot of levels of advocacy to get a child — especially one that has experienced trauma — the services they need, she said.
One of the cons of North Carolina’s system is that it is state-mandated but county-implemented, Osborne said. That means that counties handle kinship care based on how each one decides to implement it, she said. And all counties don’t have the same resources: One might be able to have someone focus on tracking down kin for children, but another may not have the resources for that.
Osborne would like to see long-term placements made more swiftly.
“That two years that they’re idling in [a] stranger’s home while they figure out where this child should be … that’s a huge amount of time out of a child’s life,” she said.
Traversy said so many people have told her that they wish they could have been a kinship placement for a family member, but they didn’t have the credentials or the resources. Some said they hadn’t known a family member was in the child welfare system.
Making kinship placements a priority early in the process helps the child and traditional foster parents, who don’t have to give up a child they have bonded with because a family member is found a year later, Osborne said.
“The reality is, these family members don’t come out of the blue,” she said. “It’s just we had not found them before now, or it had not been a stable situation before now.”
“If we do it right, we’re going to use a foster home with strangers as a last resort, not as a frontline thing,” Osborne said.
Traversy missed out on a chance to live with family because the state of New Hampshire, where she ended up spending eight years in foster care, didn’t then have a strong kinship program.
After taking a DNA test as an adult, Traversy learned she had cousins about her age. When she connected with them, they told her they wished they had known about her when she was younger because their family could have taken her in.
“I wish someone would have taken that extra step to find out my biological father had a brother and children out there that I could have grown up around,” she said.
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