First Year Evaluation Report: Family to Family Program.

The Family to Family program provides relief to families with emotionally impaired children through regular out-of-home respite care with host families. The overall goal of the program is to keep families with seriously emotionally impaired children intact, thus avoiding out-of-home placement. The program therefore involves, in addition to establishing organizational, technical, and material resources necessary to implementing the program, three major activities: (1) identifying suitable consumer families, (2) identifying suitable host families, and (3) providing ongoing support to both consumer and host families. This report comments briefly on each of these facets. It assesses parental attitudes towards their Family to Family experience and the functioning of their emotionally impaired children. It includes various problems faced in the start-up; recruitment of consumers; identification of host families; provision of support services; and retention issues. The support provided to the consumer and host families was found to be appropriate. Efforts of the staff to support the families through meetings, personal contacts, and a program newsletter were deemed suitable if not exemplary. Staff progress notes and observations indicate a positive program evaluation by the consumer and host families, but a more authoritative answer will have to await data in the final report. (JDM)