W.Va. Joins ‘Home For Every Child’ Foster Care Initiative 

West Virginia is the 19^th state to join a national initiative aimed at improving the foster care system. 

At a press conference Thursday, Gov. Patrick Morrisey joined Assistant Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Adams to sign the paperwork to officially join the Home For Every Child initiative. 

The national effort is part of Fostering the Future for American Children and Families, an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in November. 

A Home For Every Child initiative has two primary goals: decreasing the number of children entering the foster care system and increasing the number of available homes for those who do.   

“When we launched this campaign, we talked to states and said, ‘There’s two ways to get your ratio of homes to kids up. You can recruit more homes or retain more of your existing homes and the faith-based community has a major role to play in that. Most importantly, you can shrink the number of kids coming into foster care through effective prevention services,’” Adams said.  

“What really excites me about what I’ve heard from Governor Morrissey and his whole team is they’re going to focus on both sides of that equation, preventing entry, shortening length of stay, and recruiting and retaining through faith-based partnerships and other means,” he said.  

Morrisey said the state is in the process of redesigning its foster parent certification process to reduce both barriers and delays that discourage good families from stepping forward. 

“We want to make it easier for caring, qualified families to help children in need,” he said. “At the same time, we’re also strengthening oversight of taxpayer dollars by implementing additional verification systems to reduce waste and ensure resources are directed to where they belong – and that’s helping kids and families who are in need.” 

Morrisey emphasized the importance of churches and other faith-based institutions playing a significant role in addressing child welfare challenges.  

“So much work has been done over a long period of time by our churches, our faith-based community, all across different denominations. We think that’s critical,” Morrisey said.  

With a focus on faith-based support and less red tape for case workers, West Virginia will report its progress to the federal government each month, and a leaderboard will track improvements state by state.  

“Governor Morrissey will be able to see monthly how his data compares to other states, and often what we see is the competitive juices starting to go so having actionable data and competition we think will drive more meaningful progress,” Adams said. “If we do this right, if we execute on this, we will have homes waiting on children, not children waiting on homes.” 

Adams said nationwide, there are currently 57 available homes for every 100 children entering the foster care system.