Keeping it in the family: a Los Angeles campaign organizes against state policies that put kids into foster care.(REPORT)(Community Coalition)

GRANDMOTHERS AND OTHER RELATIVES caring for foster children in South Los Angeles, where 98 percent of residents are people of color--mostly Black and Latino--have garnered new rights and benefits after taking their demands statewide. Their reforms spotlighted the disparity in resources, which contributes to the overwhelming trend toward removing children from their relatives in poor communities of color and placing them in foster care or group homes.

Community Coalition, a local grassroots organization, began in 1999 to organize relative caregivers in South Los Angeles. Having long been excluded from federal foster care benefits, family members began to demand respect and equal support for the vital role they play as caregivers for tens of thousands of young people in South L.A.

Relatives are not eligible to receive federal foster care benefits like the packages awarded to private foster families and group homes unless they enter the formal foster care system themselves. Most relatives have determined not to enter a formal relationship with foster services because families are afraid to have government-issued restrictions in their lives.

"There is a lot of shame around the foster system," says Aurea Montes-Rodriguez, Community Coalition's former associate director. As residents in South L.A. face disproportionately high levels of poverty and incarceration, children are often left to the foster care system and separated from their families and communities.

While foster families and private group homes can be paid between $1,200 and $5,500 in federal funds for every child they care for, family members are eligible for only a fraction of that--no more than $500 through the California program for relative caregivers. Though at least 35 states have subsidized programs for relative caregivers, most, including the KinGap program in California, do not achieve parity with the private foster caregivers.

States have an incentive to place children in private foster homes, as each child brings in thousands in federal dollars. Despite numerous studies demonstrating that children placed with family members fare better in the long term, federal regulations make ...