While families benefit most from services provided by specialized professionals, finding providers with these competencies is often difficult. Lack of infrastructure for service coordination among providers and organizations that specialize in serving kinship and adoptive families may limit their visibility within the community1. Communities have also struggled to strengthen interagency collaboration due to a number…

Children face caregiving disruptions as a result of family adversity, often related to poverty, neglect, maltreatment, or contact with the criminal justice system1. The disruption in the caregiving placement constitutes an additional source of acute stress, and sometimes trauma, for the child and the family. Relatives responding to the need to care for the affected…

The census estimates that there are 230,850 (9.2%) children living in kinship households in Ohio 10 . Almost 100,000 grandparents in Ohio are the primary caregivers for their grandchildren, often caring for multiple children in the household1. Of these grandparents, 67% are under the age of 60, 58% are in the workforce, 22% are in…

Kinship caregivers include relatives or close friends that become responsible for a child in their extended family or social network. Collectively, they account for the care of more than 2.5 million children in the United States. The circumstances leading to these caregiving arrangements can vary significantly but often follow a family crisis, during which there…

Kinship and adoptive families face unique challenges that are often not well accommodated in the traditional service systems designed to support foster families. Kinship navigation programs and post-adoption programs have attempted to meet the gaps but have done so with mixed success. Moreover, due to low rigor in the research design of evaluations of kinship…

OhioKAN is a flexible and responsive kinship and adoption navigator program designed to support children, youth, and their families. OhioKAN partners with families to strengthen their networks and connect them with programs and services that meet their unique needs. Building on the premise that families are inherently capable of finding solutions to the circumstances and…

Understand the context and unique challenges that kinship and adoptive families face that inspired the development of OhioKAN.