A trio of lawmakers introduced a bill Wednesday that would funnel $10 million into pilot projects aimed at keeping siblings together in foster care.
The Protecting Relationships in Foster Care Act was co-authored by Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Zach Nunn of Iowa and Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, who all co-chair the Congressional Foster Youth Caucus.
“Keeping siblings together in the foster care system significantly increases their chance of having positive life outcomes,” Bacon said in a press release, noting that his experience as an adoptive father of siblings has given him firsthand awareness of the hurdles families face.
“We have a responsibility to support children in foster care with stable, loving homes that keep families connected.”
The bill directs Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy to appropriate $10 million over five years to fund up to five pilot projects. State, local and tribal child welfare agencies are eligible to apply, as well as faith-based organizations and nonprofits. Selected projects would be required to focus on sibling groups of three or more because they are generally harder to place. Siblings with a wide age gap or complex medical needs would also be prioritized, and the organizations would be required to collect and report placement and outcome data.
Often-cited research from 2011 estimates that while the vast majority of youth in foster care have siblings, between 53% and 80% are separated from their brothers and sisters. Multiple challenges contribute to this, according to child welfare agencies, including a lack of space in single homes, siblings entering the system at different times, and siblings having vast age gaps or needs.
“I’ve worked with families navigating this system — and the biggest barrier to keeping siblings together isn’t willingness, it’s capacity,” said Nunn, who is also the adoptive parent of siblings. “This bill funds the foster care models that can actually keep siblings together, and our resolution makes clear that Congress sees this as a priority.”
Similar bills have been introduced as far back as 2021 but never made it through. Bacon has co-authored versions of this legislation since 2022.
“This bill funds the foster care models that can actually keep siblings together, and our resolution makes clear that Congress sees this as a priority.”
— Rep. Zach Nunn
The current bill’s language is scant on specifics. Unclear is whether the pilot projects’ funding would come from existing Title IV-E foster care dollars or from another source. There are also no additional details regarding the projects’ design.
Longtime advocate and policy expert Isabel Stasa helped draft a Senate companion bill in 2023. She offered an example of the type of pilot the legislation could support: a program that would pay retainer stipends to foster families who have more space in their homes in order to reserve those beds for large sibling groups.
“Foster parents only really get their reimbursements when they have a placement,” Stasa said. “Instead, in the interim, have some kind of incentive for them to hold out for those large sibling groups, so that when they come in, there’s enough beds in one home.”
Stasa personally knows the effect of lost sibling connections. At the age of 13, she and two younger siblings were taken into foster care and placed in separate homes. Three other siblings remained with their birth family.
“Because of my age, it was very difficult to find a placement willing to take me in, let alone a group of three,” she said.
She never reunified with them.
Her younger siblings were eventually adopted by different families. A couple of years ago, during a chance run-in at a restaurant, Stasa reconnected with one adopted sibling who had moved to a different city and was given a different name.
“I never would have found them,” she said. “We’re trying to have a relationship, but it doesn’t feel like it did when we were kids. It’s very fractured and different.”
“Keeping siblings together changes lifetime outcomes. Separating them also changes lifetime outcomes.”
— Lily Colby, National Network for Fostering Sibling Connections
Lily Colby, founder of the National Network for Fostering Sibling Connections, also has ideas about how potential pilots could keep more siblings together. Without support, she said, the burden of caring for multiple children can be too high for caregivers.
Funding for expanded housing, transportation and mental health care “are all ways we can help support families and keep children from having to grow up alone and separated,’’ she said. Higher foster care payments for families willing to take in large sibling groups could also help.
“Keeping siblings together changes lifetime outcomes,’’ she said. “Separating them also changes lifetime outcomes.”
Colby, like Stasa, experienced sibling separation and eventually became a kinship caregiver for her youngest brother. She sees the new legislation as one piece of a broader approach to preventing siblings from being split up.
She noted that laws protecting sibling relationships already exist, but said they need to be better enforced. Provisions of the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 require states to prioritize placing youth together and to ensure that siblings can visit and communicate with each other when separated. The law also mandates that states must seek out kinship placements by locating and notifying relatives when children go into care. But this isn’t consistently happening across states, Colby said.
Kinship caregivers are more likely to take in siblings regardless of age or special needs, and those placements tend to be more stable and enduring. Locating these relatives — and providing the support they need for approval and to care for multiple children — will be vital to fully addressing this issue, Colby said.
But she noted: “Having any person in Congress talking about sibling connections is awesome.”