About 200,000 children in our state are being raised by relatives — mostly grandmothers — or close family friends outside of the foster-care system.

Kinship care is not an anomaly. One in 11 of all Americans will live in a kinship home at some point in their childhood; one in five Black children will live in a kinship home.

While most people are familiar with foster care, kinship care is far more frequent. According to a report released in October by Generations United, for every child in foster care in the United States, there are 19 children being raised by kin outside of foster care.

The report finds, “Without grandparent and other kin caregivers, the foster care system would be totally overwhelmed and it would cost taxpayers at least $10.5 billion annually in foster care payments alone.”

The report also finds that children raised by kin, when adequately supported, fare better academically, emotionally, and socially than those in non-relative foster care.

The key is adequate support.

Since the vast majority of kinship caregivers are doing their work outside the formal foster-care system, they don’t have the support and finances that back the state’s foster homes.

Researchers estimate the average annual investment to support a child in foster care is between $33,000 and $65,000, which includes government expenditure on a child’s medical needs, court costs, foster-care maintenance costs, and administrative costs of the agency overseeing the child’s removal and placement, including the caseworker’s salary.

Most kin caregivers need help finding financial and legal assistance or affordable housing or health care or food and nutrition assistance.

Since 2004, the Kinship Navigator has been helping caregivers in New York state take on this enormous task. It is a Catholic Charities Family and Community Services, funded by the New York State Office of Children and Family Services.

“It’s a website, it’s a phone line, and it helps coordinate the response of the government in the communities across the state. It serves all 62 counties,” said Gerard Wallace, who helped found the Kinship Navigator and served as its director from 2006 until he retired. Rae Glaser became director of the program in 2020.

Looking back at his career, Wallace said in an Enterprise podcast this month, “Getting the law to line up with what’s best for the child was a lifetime of work. And it’s not done.”

He had a hand in creating a dozen laws in New York state that give grandmothers and other kin rights in caring for children whose parents are unfit.

What should someone do who is worried about a child they love being raised in an unsafe home?

“They should call the Kinship Navigator,” said Wallace.

The website is nysnavigator.org. The phone number is 877-454-6463.

The website includes 50 legal factsheets, originally written by Wallace, that can help caregivers in applying for benefits. Caregivers can access these fact sheets to assist them, for instance, in applying for benefits through Disability Determination Services, at family court, or enrolling a child into school — all arranged by topic.

The Navigator helps kinship caregivers, its website says, “by providing information on financial assistance, legal information and referrals, and other types of issues that caregivers face when raising children in order to provide stability and permanency in the home.” The website offers a pull-down menu with resources listed for each county, including Albany County.

In short, the Kinship Navigator tries to fill the gap for caregivers who don’t benefit from the services offered by the government-funded foster-care system.

“You can talk to someone there,” said Wallace. “They will tell you what is available in our community. You can be put in touch with a lawyer through Legal Aid.”

Parents may be unable to care for their children for a variety of reasons, including incarceration, mental illness, substance abuse, abandonment, or death. There can also be temporary needs such as military deployment, job-related duties, or personal challenges.

Wallace said that relatives or close friends trying to help a child in need usually fall into one of two situations: “I want to get the child … or I have the child.”

“And from each of those situations,” he said, “flows a lot of legal discussion as to what your chances are and what your legal rights are as to intervening and getting that child into your home.”

He went on, “Parents have fundamental rights … and that’s good. But there are inroads against those fundamental rights in family court, depending on what you can show of the circumstances.”

Rights for kinship caregivers have increased because of laws Wallace pushed for.

Wallace gave an example of a pregnant teacher who separated from her abusive husband and went to live with her mother, Brigitte Castellano, on Long Island. When the teacher was killed by a drunken driver, the court ordered the child, who at age 5 had never lived anywhere but with his grandparents, to live with his father instead.

The judge told her, “Mrs. Castellano, you have no rights. I want you to go home and pack his bags,” Wallace reported, adding, “The dad had just shown up and petitioned for custody because there was going to be a lot of money involved.”

He went on, “We changed the law, but not enough to help Brigitte.”

The law, known as The Grandparents’ Rights Act, codified a 24-month period so that, if a child had lived for that long with a grandparent, “you got to a trial,” said Wallace. He tried for years to extend that to other relatives besides grandparents but without success.

Another law that Wallace pushed to pass has to do with making medical decisions for a child. The law used to require parents or guardians to make medical decisions but now gives legal custodians of a child that authority as well.

Similarly, one of the first laws that Wallace got passed, in 1999, allows legal custodians as well as parents and guardians to designate someone else to care for a child. “It was originally good for only one year,” Wallace said. “A few years back, we got it up to two years.”

For example, if a mother were in need of an operation and wanted her mother to care for the child, she could use the parental-designation law.

This law is particularly useful now at a time of mass deportations of immigrants. If parents are going to be deported out of the country and don’t want their children raised there, “Those children can stay here because they were born here,” said Wallace. The agreement can take effect when the caregiver assumes care.

Wallace has pictures in his Rensselaerville home of the grandmothers he has worked with over the years — ranging from a Brooklyn gospel singer to a Native American who raised two grandchildren with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a severe muscle-wasting disease.

“That lady walked on water in my mind …,” said Wallace. “Both of these ladies would come, we would drive to Washington to advocate at the Capitol.”

He went on about the kinship caregivers he worked with over the years,  “Every one of them was the whole reason behind all this. When you met these people, you said, ‘Wait, you’re 68 and you have diabetes and you’re overweight and you’re retired with a pension, and now you’re going to take on a 2-year-old who’s got special needs?’”

Contrasting the government support for the foster-care system with the lack of support for kinship caregivers, Wallace said, “How unfair, how brutal to put a grandmother in charge of a young child at the great disadvantage she has of age and circumstance, and deny her help.”

Wallace described New York state’s system for foster care as county-based. “Each country is like its own world,” he said, and the counties don’t have money to take on more child care. “They don’t have enough money to pay for the services for special-needs foster kids they’ve already got. They’re really, really hard-pressed.”

Wallace gave the example of a non-parent grant that is available for people caring for children not in foster care. Some counties, he said, were misinformed and thought a court order of guardianship was needed to get the grant “when the law was you just have to be caring for the child full-time in your home,” he said.

The Kinship Navigator website offers guidance in getting that grant, he said, but only about a quarter of the families who are eligible for the grant are receiving it.

Wallace also stressed the importance of calling on the Kinship Navigator, for a wide variety of reasons, to “get a lawyer involved.”

“Court is a big deal,” said Wallace, “and the authority that you get out of the court is really the critical matter … If you get the child, pretty much it’s a slam dunk … What if you get a very young child and you’re on Social Security? Should you go to court and get guardianship? Legal custody? We said, if at all possible, adopt because, as an adoptive parent, the child is added to your Social Security ….

“Monetary consequences differ depending on your legal status and that needs to be informed to the caregiver,” said Wallace, noting that, whether a caregiver is a custodian or guardian of a child, matters all the way to financial aid for college.

“If you’re the custodian, they don’t attribute your income to the child,” he said. “But, if you’re a guardian, they do attribute your income … It makes a difference for what your scholarship is.”

Kinship care is not new. As Wallace pointed out, George Washington, the father of our country, was also a grandfather, caring for two of his grandchildren without a legal arrangement. It is past time, in 250 years, for our laws and services to catch up with the reality that 1 in 11 Americans will live in a kinship home at some point in their childhood.

If the people caring for these children get the support they need, our society as a whole will benefit.

Action can be taken on a local level. With Albany County getting large opioid settlements, we urge that some of that money be spent on getting needed services to kinship caregivers since more than a third of children placed in foster care because of parental substance use are placed with relatives. 

On an individual level, we urge readers who have taken on the task of raising children who are not their own to seek help through the Kinship Navigator.

We commend you for your work not just because, as the Generations United report calculated, it is saving each of us money in taxes but, more importantly, because every child who is raised with love and care is an asset to our society.

Further, we urge each of our readers to pay attention to your neighbors who are kinship caregivers and help them when you can. They are all around us.

Gerard Wallace said it best.

He encouraged ​​the grandparents and other relatives and even family friends who are caring for children in need.

“They deserve the respect and admiration of their community, and they deserve all the help they can get. And I’ve told you a few ways that they can go get help, but they should not be ashamed,” he said, “not think of what they’re doing is because of a failure. 

“It isn’t. Life throws us many turns, many curveballs. You’re doing the most important job in the world. I admire you, appreciate, and love all of you for what you are doing.”