The goal of the Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF’s) A Home for Every Child initiative is to have a safe and supportive home available for every child or youth in foster care. ACF measures the initiative’s success by a one-to-one home-to-child ratio, meaning there are as many foster homes available as there are children in foster care. In 2025, the national ratio was 57 foster homes for every 100 children in care.
This brief presents findings across five states with some of the best baseline home-to-child ratios, highlighting themes in states’ strategies, areas of progress, and challenges. This brief also discusses opportunities for ACF to help states meet the goal of A Home for Every Child.
Available Reports:
Improving Home to Child Ratio Cross-Site Findings
Related Products:
Report Summary:
This brief presents findings from case studies in five states—Idaho, Oregon, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Vermont—on strategies to improve the ratio of homes available to children in foster care, as a part of ACF's A Home for Every Child initiative. It reflects both prior and ongoing efforts from these states.
Key Points:
- ACF’s A Home for Every Child initiative aims to improve the ratio of available foster homes to children in care. States can pursue this goal by increasing placement capacity, preventing unnecessary entries into care, and promoting timely permanency.
- The five states expanded their foster care placement capacity by identifying relatives, fictive kin, and other trusted adults before recruiting new foster families. States used locally tailored recruitment and streamlined licensing approaches to make it easier for families to become foster parents.
- States sought to reduce unnecessary foster care entries by strengthening decision making about removal, improving coordination with other public systems, and connecting families to voluntary services.
- States reported efforts to improve reunification and permanency through simplified case plans, enhanced family supports, increased monitoring of progress, and the use of data to identify children and families that could benefit from earlier intervention.
- States highlighted strong partnerships, foster parent support and retention efforts, and increased use of data and continuous quality improvement processes as important contributors to improving their home-to-child ratios.
- Despite their progress, states continue to face challenges, including limitations in data and analytic capacity, difficulty in recruiting homes for youth with complex needs, and service gaps, among others. ACF has taken numerous recent steps to empower states to innovate and overcome such barriers.
Strategies Used by States
Cross-cutting themes were identified across interviews from the five states with some of the best home-to-child ratios (as calculated using Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) data on the number of children in care at the end of FY2024 and the number of foster homes in 2025 from The Imprint’s Who Cares: A National Count of Foster Homes and Families dataset).
Recruiting foster parents: States used localized recruitment strategies. For example, Oregon and Idaho employ regional staff to develop local partnerships and host recruitment events. Oklahoma conducts monthly gap analyses at the zip code level, sharing results with regional providers to tailor recruitment. States also focused on identifying relatives, fictive kin, and other trusted adults before finding new foster homes, with Idaho creating a dedicated family-finding team and Vermont using eco-mapping and genograms. South Carolina and Oregon broadened kinship eligibility definitions.
Updating licensure and approval: All five states worked to reduce administrative burden. South Carolina and Idaho digitized application and licensing processes. Oregon currently allows home studies to be completed before training finishes. Vermont relaxed upfront documentation rules. States balanced streamlining with safety protections—Oregon, South Carolina, and Vermont addressed barriers like bedroom requirements for kin caregivers, while Idaho cut basic training time by more than half and made it self-paced.
Supporting and retaining foster parents: Four states emphasized gathering feedback through surveys, advisory groups, and follow-up with foster parents. Relationships and resources—including helplines, clinicians, case managers, and financial assistance—were highlighted as important. Vermont equalized reimbursement rates for relative and non-relative foster parents. Three states offered peer mentoring programs, with Oklahoma reporting improved retention as a result.
Preventing entry into foster care: All states reported making services available to families to reduce unnecessary or more extensive child welfare involvement. Oklahoma highlighted home visiting as a centerpiece of its primary prevention strategy. Idaho and Vermont offer voluntary case management and other services to families whose reports were screened out, while Oregon is piloting proactive support to screened-out families through referrals to agency staff or community-based organizations. South Carolina implements a prevention program, Teaming for Teens, bringing families, community partners, and service providers together to address behavioral and family needs.
Four states reported strengthening existing practices and tools. South Carolina and Idaho provide additional training and guidance for mandated reporters to distinguish families who could benefit from social services from situations with serious safety concerns. Idaho, Vermont, and Oklahoma provide guidance, training, and coaching to child welfare staff to make more consistent decisions about removal.
Promoting permanency and placement stability: All five states worked to improve reunification, including simplifying service plans, offering flexible visitation, and continuing services after children return home. Idaho and Oklahoma used case-level data to identify factors related to delays or instability. As a result, Idaho reduced average time from removal to reunification by about three months.
Progress and Challenges
States reported progress toward improved home-to-child ratios due to their placement processes, prevention efforts, and reunification and permanency support. States attribute their success to strong partnerships, foster parent support, and data use.
Despite progress in finding a home for every child, states face ongoing challenges related to data use, service gaps, administrative requirements, and workforce retention that could hinder efforts to improve their home-to-child ratios.
Conclusion
Common strategies across states included identifying relatives, fictive kin, and other trusted adults as placement resources; using locally tailored recruitment approaches; reducing barriers to foster parent licensing and approval; providing meaningful supports to foster families; and strengthening prevention, placement stability, and permanency efforts. States emphasized partnerships and data-driven continuous quality improvement, while continuing to face workforce, administrative, and service-gap challenges. The experiences of these five states demonstrate that improving home-to-child ratios requires coordinated efforts across the child welfare continuum of care, from prevention services and family support to placement stability and timely permanency.
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