Baltimore: ‘All in for kin’
This story is one of a series written in connection with our 2024 Signature Report, A season of hope: Growing the role of families, which focuses on the importance of kin for children in foster care.
“Kinship care is investing in each other,” says Tracie Cook-Thomas, a kinship navigator at the KinCare Center in Baltimore, Maryland. “It’s investing in the families that are around you. Because we’re all connected.”
The KinCare Center, launched virtually during the pandemic and then physically in East Baltimore in 2022, is a physical representation of Baltimore City Department of Social Services’ commitment to supporting families caring for their relatives’ children when they can’t remain safely at home.
Any family in the community can go to the center to access support and services as varied as diapers, clothing, food assistance, mental health support, transportation and more. Cook-Thomas is one of the kinship navigators at the center who help families find their way through what can be an overwhelming amount of information and confusion.
“This has been a culture change for our agency as a whole,” says Brandi Stocksdale, director of the Baltimore City Department of Social Services (BCDSS). “Our staff have embraced the idea of ‘Baltimore City DSS, we are all in for kin.’”
The department’s journey to focusing on kin has been bolstered by partnership and technical assistance from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which has its national headquarters in Baltimore.
BCDSS got a head start on new federal guidelines that aim to simplify licensing for kinship caregivers, using a waiver in a pilot project to more quickly pursue their goals of both increasing the percentage of children placed with kin and the percentage of those kin who are licensed so they receive financial support that unlicensed and informal caregivers don’t receive. Since they started the pilot in 2023, 39% of young people removed from their homes are placed with kin, up from 32%. (The department’s goal is 50%.) Of those, 88% of kinship caregivers have been licensed, with a goal of 90%. The state of Maryland is among the states that have submitted a plan for kin-specific licensing to the federal Children’s Bureau.
Those numbers translate to more help for families and better outcomes for children.
“When you place them with a relative, they know who they’re being placed with,” says Corine Mullings, deputy director of Child and Family Services at BCDSS. “That lessens the trauma of being removed from their natural home.”
Demetrius Hicks is another kinship navigator at the center.
“I love being able to help families,” says Hicks, who has been invited to family dinners and barbecues by the families he assists. “There’s nothing greater than, honestly, having a family say thank you or call you … and say, ‘Listen, I don’t know what I would have done without your help.’”
Cook-Thomas agrees. “We have the whole family in our lens, and we want to secure families, because it secures communities. It’s not just about us doing a removal, but more so us doing enrichment to a family to strengthen the family, because that’s going to strengthen the communities and that’s what’s needed in Baltimore. … Hope is what we do.”