A Home for Every Child

Across Tribal Nations, children have always been cared for by extended family, clan systems, and community networks grounded in culture, responsibility, and belonging. Tribal child welfare systems are rooted in the understanding that children thrive when they remain connected to their families, their traditions, and their homelands.

As federal priorities evolve—including through initiatives such as the Fostering the Future for American Children and Families Executive Order there is meaningful opportunity to align national goals with what Tribes have long known: preventing unnecessary foster care placements, strengthening kinship care, and supporting youth into adulthood are most effective when they are community-driven and culturally grounded.

For Tribal Nations, the path forward is clear. Resource family and kinship care development must be designed by Tribes, for Tribes, and implemented in ways that keep children safely within their own communities whenever possible. This means building strong kinship and customary care systems that reflect Tribal definitions of family. It means ensuring relatives and community caregivers have access to equitable financial support, training, respite, and wraparound services. It means investing in prevention services—family preservation, behavioral health, traditional healing, and in-home supports—so that families receive help before crises lead to separation.

It also means supporting Tribal child welfare systems to strengthen data modernization and accountability, and the development and implementation of programs designed to recruit, engage and retain resource and kin providers to support the children in the community when they cannot remain safely in their own home.

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) new A Home for Every Child initiative will allow ACF to prioritize matters that safely decrease the number of children entering foster care through effective prevention, while also increasing the number of foster homes through diligent recruitment, prioritizing kin, and improving retention of existing caregivers. This initiative provides a child welfare focus around a simple goal—to have homes waiting on kids, not kids waiting on homes. In alignment with the direction of the federal initiative, this presents an opportunity to support Tribes in creating community driven programs grounded in the traditional values and beliefs of the communities to support local solutions to increasing the availability of resource families.

At the heart of this work is a simple but powerful goal: ensuring that American Indian and Alaska Native children remain safely connected to their families, their culture, and their communities. When Tribal Nations have the resources and authority to lead resource family and kinship care development, children do more than achieve permanency—they remain rooted in who they are and where they belong – where they all feel at home.