Strengthening Kin-First Practices in San Diego

Project Context:

• San Diego County’s Child and Family Well-Being Department (CFWB) wanted to increase the number of children placed with kin caregivers while living away from their parents. Leaders saw that keeping children connected to their family and community could offer comfort, stability, and often lead to better, long-term outcomes.
• To make this possible for more kids in care, CFWB sought to better support their staff as they started building and maintaining every child’s relational network earlier.
• The GPL provided analytical support that helped leaders identify key challenges: initial kin placement rates were low; it took a long time to make kin placements; and Black youth were much less likely than their peers to be placed with kin.
  • These insights helped CFWB focus their efforts on testing operational strategies to increase kin placements, especially for Black youth.

How the GPL Supported:

• With support from the GPL, CFWB introduced new ways to measure and communicate the importance of kin-first practices across San Diego’s large system with many programs and staff handoffs. This included:
  • Developing and circulating a quarterly Kin Placement Report. Now, rather than just tracking overall kin placement rates, staff are now monitoring data by region, race, and the time it takes to place with kin.
  • Having agency leadership regularly incorporate kinship data in conversations with staff in supervision and team meetings.
  • Conducting roundtable discussions with program chiefs and managers to discuss data and kin-first management strategies.
• Helped San Diego’s central region, the largest in terms of youth in care and the most diverse in the county, as they began piloting new approaches to proactively build collaboration across program areas.
  • Leaders wanted to support staff in identifying and engaging children’s kin networks prior to a removal decision to increase the likelihood that initial placement would be with kin.

Results:

• Overall, San Diego County increased the share of kids initially placed with kin by 9 percentage points in 2024.
  • San Diego’s central region was the first to pilot new approaches with support from the GPL and increased the share of kids initially placed with kin by 12 percentage points in 2024.
• In addition, the agency reduced racial disparities in placement rates, with the share of Black children placed with their kin increasing by 12 percentage points in 2024.