January 21, 2026
The Children’s Bureau recently issued Technical Bulletin #14, which offers a new approach to the federal Child and Family Services Review (CFSR) by focusing states on the “central outcome metric” of “a foster-home-to-child ratio greater than 1:1.” Assistant Secretary for Family Support at the Administration for Children and Families Alex Adams explains that “States can improve this ratio in two ways: strengthening the numerator to increase the number of foster homes, and/or reducing the denominator to safely keep children out of foster care.”
It’s critically important that states implement targeted strategies to:
- prevent children from entering foster care;
- reduce the amount of time children spend in care; and
- increase kinship care for children.
For those children who do enter foster care and cannot be placed with kin (which should become a small number if the kinds of strategies noted above are implemented), there are concrete strategies that are highly effective in recruiting and retaining foster parents.
Unfortunately, many jurisdictions continue tabling at fairs and implementing general marketing campaigns, despite the fact that these strategies don’t produce a good return on investment (ROI).
General marketing campaigns can produce many inquiries but the vast majority of those individuals don’t end up becoming foster parents, which means a lot of wasted time and effort. Child welfare agencies can generate more appropriate inquiries by leveraging existing foster parents who can serve as ambassadors and help recruit foster parents from their own networks. And foster parents can help support one another when they are connected to each other in their neighborhoods and communities.
What works is a targeted approach that includes these eight strategies:
- Use data to target recruitment efforts
- Utilize existing foster parents to recruit additional foster homes
- Develop (rather than recruit) homes for teens
- Streamline the certification process and support prospective foster parents through it
- Implement a “One Family One Home” strategy (Do not place children from different families in the same foster home.)
- Strengthen customer service and supports to foster parents
- Connect foster parents to one another to provide mutual support
- Set targets and monitor the results
My team at the NYC Administration for Children’s Services implemented these strategies in NYC in partnership with Action Research. We increased the number of newly recruited homes by 50% over two years and improved foster parent support. Read the case study and op-ed that was written about this work.
JULIE FARBER CONSULTING 