They Call Me Momma:
Relatives Raising Children

Part 6

Aired October 9, 2001

Cuyahoga County is home to a program designed to help kinship caregivers that's unlike any other in the country. According to the American Association of Retired Persons, the number of grandparents and older relatives raising kids has increased by 40% in the last decade. Numbers like these have prompted Ohio's public agencies to closely examine the issue and develop ways to get caregivers the help they need. As 90.3 WCPN®'s Renita Jablonski reports in the next entry in our series on kinship care, "They Call Me Momma," getting help to access legal, respite, and community services may just be a phone call away.

Renita Jablonski–Rosa-Linda Demore-Brown has been working for the county for a little less than a year. She's part of a new state and county-sponsored program that's specifically aimed at getting kinship caregivers the services they need. Demore-Brown is a Community Navigator in the Hough neighborhood in Cleveland. She and nine other Navigators use specially equipped laptop computers, complete with the health and human services database for all of Cuyahoga County.

Rosa-Linda Demore-Brown–They know what your eligible for, the navigators do. That's why they have them. She knows what I'm eligible for and what I'm not.

RJ–Rita Bell is a Cleveland grandmother who's raising two of her grandchildren. She discovered the Grandparent and Other Kinship Caregiver Initiative Navigator program a couple months ago. A worker from the county Department of Senior and Adult Services told her about it during a welfare workshop. Bell says she became frustrated when she felt her social worker was not doing her best to assist Bell in getting things she needed for her grandkids. She says she's eligible for federal assistance and is not getting support from her social worker to access the money.

Rita Bell–I just got a letter denying me once again. I said, "okay, I've had it with this woman."

RJ–That's when Bell decided to give her local Navigator a call. After listening to her complaints, Rosa-Linda Demore-Brown advised Bell to file an appeal with the state to review her request for assistance.

RB–And she told me to let her know when the hearing is set and she'll be there with me.

RDB–We're waiting on her date for her appeal and they we'll go for her hearing, actually what they call it, they call it a state hearing and I'm going to go with her and we're confident we'll be victorious.

RJ–And that's basically how the navigator program works. They've been put in place to link caregivers to any and every service that may be of assistance to the caregiver. Jane Fumich is the director of the Cuyahoga County Department of Senior and Adult Services. She says it was about five years ago when she realized the needs of kinship caregivers had to be addressed.

Jane Fumich–We provide services for frail and impaired older persons in their own homes to help keep them independent and our home health-aides that go out and provide personal care and homemaker services for these older persons were coming back and indicating, "when I go to provide services for Mrs. Smith, who needs our assistance, do you know she's raising four kids?" And so, we began to see this in our own case load in providing services to frail seniors.

RJ–Fumich says the navigator program has already served about 1,500 caregivers since its nine-month pilot period kicked off last fall. She says as long as the funds are available, the new initiative will stay put. Right now contracts are in place through June 2002.

JF–We were funded through Temporary Assistance to Needy Families dollars through the, what they call the Prevention Retention Contingency Funds, that's how we got started. With that funding not available at this point, there is some funding through the state's navigator program and then the Board of County Commissioners here in Cuyahoga County have put money to the program, recognizing its importance and not wanting this program to discontinue.

RJ–Ron Browder is Chief of the Bureau of Family Services for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. That's the agency charged with establishing a statewide network of kinship care navigators. He says the state also recognizes the program's importance but stresses there's no guarantee that it will continue receiving support.

Ron Browder–Governor Taft, to his credit and the General Assembly did protect the Navigator Program in that the funding was stabilized for this biennium, of course as you know, we are going through a serious economic slump at this point and no one I believe knows at this point what that will mean to any of our programs that we have in Ohio.

RJ–Browder says lawmakers cannot afford to ignore kinship care as an issue. He says when you consider Census numbers indicating that more than 80,000 children in Ohio are living in some sort of relative care arrangement, kinship initiatives are a crucial part of foster care reform.

RBr–There have to be systems that are there to aid them in this job and by having those relatives step forward and provide care for those children, they reduce a already very over-burdened system of foster care that we know cannot withstand a greater influx of children coming in.

RJ–While state and local officials agree the kinship navigator program is a good idea, it is not without its flaws. Navigator Rosa-Linda Demore-Brown says one problem is that the resource database she refers to so that she can tell caregivers where to go for things like food and clothing is not updated so there's no way of telling whether or not something like a soup kitchen is still operating. And she says there are some kinship caregivers that aren't able to use navigators at all. Because the navigator initiative is partially funded using Temporary Assistance for Needy Families money, participants must meet eligibility requirements putting them anywhere from 100% to 200% of poverty.

RDB–I know especially with some of the navigators who are working in the suburbs running into an issue where a lot of their clients are not income eligible for some of the resources because they are driven by income guidelines. There again, just because a person may have a certain income, doesn't mean that they don't need help too.

RJ–Demore-Brown says she's fielded more than 300 calls from kinship caregivers since she became a navigator. While questions about where to get clothing and food top the list of requests from grandparents and other relatives, she is unable to do anything about what she hears the most - pleas for financial assistance.