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The Hartford Division Celebrates 25 Years of Service to Area Youth and Families

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Hartford, CT – The Hartford Division of Casey Family Services – the direct service agency of the Annie E. Casey Foundation – marks a quarter-century of work that has helped to improve the lives of some of the area’s most vulnerable children and families.

In 1976, UPS founder, Jim Casey, established Casey Family Services in Bridgeport, as a private long-term foster care agency. Six years later, the Hartford Division opened with two employees and, soon, 30 cases. Today, the division boasts 38 employees and serves approximately 186 families and youth in foster care through reunification, post-adoption, and permanency services. They are among the 4,000 children and families that Casey Family Services divisions reach throughout New England and in Baltimore, Maryland.

“Our Hartford Division was a pioneer in establishing the agency’s first Family Reunification Program in 1989,” says Raymond L. Torres, Casey Family Services executive director, “and its work in post-adoption services became a model that we have shared among child welfare agencies across the country.”

The division’s pioneering work in reunification and post-adoption helped to guide Casey along its evolutionary path from long-term foster care to permanent family connections for all kids in care, no matter what their age. During the past five years, the division has reunified 80 percent of the cases that were referred by the state for reunification. Similarly, they have doubled the percentage of adoptions among Casey foster families, according to Glynis Cassis, Hartford Division director.

“As Casey takes on a greater leadership role in shifting child welfare policy and practice across the country to a focus on lifetime families for all children and youth in care, we recognize the importance of the Hartford Division’s 25-years of experience in building and strengthening families,” notes Torres.

Multiple community and state partnerships, including ongoing collaboration with the Department of Children and Families (DCF), have resulted in improving the delivery of services to kids in the care of the state. “Casey has worked closely with DCF on issues that our youth have said are their primary concerns,” says Cassis. Staying connected to siblings is such an issue, since brothers and sisters who come into the system are often separated. “After meeting with a group of our Casey youth advocates, DCF allocated resources toward a new sibling visitation program,” she reveals.

As part of the direct service agency of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the division has been involved on a local basis in two of the Foundation’s critical initiatives: Family Economic Success and Making Connections. Through this work, the Hartford Division has helped low-income families receive more than $170,436 in refunds through the Earned Income Tax Credit and tax assistance program and has joined community partners in making troubled neighborhoods places where children and families can thrive. Casey Family Services as a whole continues to expand its investments in Connecticut’s most vulnerable communities, supporting efforts to increase financial literacy and economic stability for underserved families in New Haven, Bridgeport, and Hartford.

The November 8, 2007, event will be held from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. at 43 Woodland Street, Hartford. Current and former youth in care, and parents, will participate in the program.