PLC provides twice-monthly visits and other supports to Department of Family Services special needs clients placed in Pennsylvania institutional care settings (Devereux, Woods, and The Village). Youth generally have mental health, behavioral, developmental, or neurological challenges and disabilities that complicate traditional foster care placements.

Trained Parent Partners establish rapport; provide individualized contact, activities, and outings; encourage birth family contact, involvement, and interactive visitation; and assist with family/kinship reunification, foster care placement, or other improved, less costly in state Delaware permanency options in settings closer to the youth’s systems of support.

The program provides supportive brief periods of structured respite, social activities and outings by a trained Parent Partner to Delaware youth residing in New Castle County foster homes. Youth have extensive care and supervision needs that would otherwise limit a foster parent’s ability to address other personal, pleasurable, or emergent situations; fill in the gap for school suspensions and illnesses; and maintain mandated supervision stipulations (such as inappropriate sexual behavior and court required monitoring).

Supervision in the absence of foster parents leads to:

• Quality of life improvements for youth
• Increased Safety
• Reduced Trauma
• Decreased Delinquency
• Fewer foster parent frustrations that lead to burnout and placement disruption