Mission and Purpose:
To support families, youth, and children in reaching their full potential. Casey Family Programs provides an array of services for children and youth with foster care as its core. Services include adoption, guardianship, kinship care, and reuniting children with birth families. Casey Family Programs is also a strong advocate for children in foster care, and it is committed to helping youth in foster care make a successful transition to adulthood. As a direct service operating foundation, Casey Family Programs does not make grants.

Purpose of Site:
The Casey Family Programs Web siteis a way for the organization to share what it has learned in order to improve the lives of far more children than it could serve directly through long-term foster care alone. The site reaches out to families, policy makers, nonprofits, and others to disseminate research and advocacy efforts related to the care of children.

Background:
Jim Casey, founder of United Parcel Service, credited his success to his family, and in particular, to his mother, who held the Casey family together after his father's death. Later in his career, Jim Casey sought ways to help those who lacked the family life he knew to be so crucial, and Casey Family Programs was created in 1966 out of this concern. By providing planned, long-term family-based foster care, the Casey family aimed to help children who were unable to live with their birth parents and provide them with stability and an opportunity to become responsible adults. In addition to providing foster care and adoption services, Casey Family Programs works with federal, state, and local policymakers, as well as other agencies, foundations, and businesses to help improve public and private services for children and their families. It also works to raise public awareness about the realities of children living in out-of-home care.

Home Page:
The home pageof the Casey Family Programs site is well organized and provides easy access to a range of forums, publications, and newsletters that advance the organization's mission. The body of the page has descriptions of several features on the site, and a column on the left side offers a set of links organized into categories — about Casey, news and publications, resources, and projects.

Outstanding Feature:
One of the resources that Casey Family Programs provides on its site is the Ansell-Casey Life Skills Assessments(ACLSA), an evaluation of the independent living skills of youth. The assessment consists of statements about life skills that the youth and caregivers complete. The scores and responses to the ACLSA reflect a youth's strengths as well as areas for growth and can be useful information for goal planning and discussing life skills. The assessment is completed online, scoring is done electronically, and the results are e-mailed to participants free of charge. The Life Skills section of the site also has a guidebookthat outlines important life skills and provides activities and exercises that can be used to teach youth. It is designed to help practitioners and caregivers create a plan for teaching life skills.

Honorable Mention:
The area of the site devoted to the National Center for Resource Family Supportoffers information and resources to foster families, adoptive parents, and kinship caregivers. Currently, it features the Federal Tax Benefits guide, a booklet that summarizes the various tax benefits that are available to resource families, and a Guide to Special Education Advocacy for Resource Families, which provides information about the rights of children or youth who have disabilities. The National Center for Resource Family Support also offers a weekly e-mail newsletter that contains items of interest to foster and adoptive parents, kinship caregivers, child welfare professionals, and others who are interested in issues related to resource families and their children.