AFC enhances its core services through four initiatives: the Visiting CASA Program, the Group Home Project, the Embracing Our Community Project, and the Academic Success Project. Each initiative addresses the needs of particular groups of foster and delinquent children.

For the past seven years, the Visiting CASA Program has addressed concerns for children placed out of San Mateo County. Currently, 40% of foster children are placed out of county due to a severe shortage of foster homes. They live far from their biological and extended families and are seen by their county social worker, generally, only once a month. Visiting CASA Advocates visit their children every two to three weeks to help them remain connected to family and friends in our county, to feel less isolated than they might otherwise feel and to obtain services that are often difficult to access out of county, such as mental health services. Visiting CASA Advocates alert social workers to particular concerns they observe to reduce delay in addressing them.

Developed in the spring of 2007, the Group Home CASA Project has focused on the special advocacy needs of delinquent young women transitioning from Juvenile Hall to the Girl’s Program and eventually to a group home placement. Many of these young women are seeking to overcome significant problems with substance abuse, mental health, anger management, gang involvement, domestic violence, and physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, all of which often cannot be adequately addressed by available professionals.  Advocate volunteers are assigned to the Girl’s Camp at the Youth Services Center and Tracey’s Place of Hope. Advocate volunteers work with the professionals to address the young women’s educational needs, job skills, compliance with program requirements, court ordered curfews and services, and preparation for independent living. They introduce the young women to clean and sober fun activities, and by supporting the young women within the group home, help to stabilize their placements.

Through the Embracing Our Community Project, AFC provides more effective and culturally sensitive services to foster children by increasing the number of African American and Latino volunteers. Through outreach and volunteer recruitment in faith-based and secular African American and Latino churches and organizations, AFC is working to have the ethnic backgrounds of our volunteers better reflect the backgrounds of the children we serve. Launched in Summer 2007, the project is a response to the alarming disproportionate representation of African American and Latino children in the foster care system. In addition to targeted outreach and recruitment, the project’s goals include increasing the cultural competency of AFC staff and strengthening AFC’s connection to the communities from which our children come.  

The Academic Success Project, launched in 2006, is designed to improve higher education and vocational outcomes for middle and high school youth through individual and systems-wide advocacy. The individual advocacy is done primarily by Advocate volunteers, each of whom is trained and supported by AFC staff.  The systems-wide advocacy is handled by AFC staff.  As the only organization involved in every aspect of children’s lives, AFC is uniquely positioned to facilitate discussions and initiate action on behalf of all of the County’s foster care and delinquent children.  AFC has already designed and hosted a community college one credit course that introduces educators to the experience of the youth we serve.  In addition to plans integrating a four credit version of this course into the regular curriculum, AFC is facilitating county-wide discussions about inter-agency information sharing and educational data collection to better understand and systematically address the academic performance of foster children.