Family Visitation Center

The OJJDP FY 10 Earmarks Program furthers the Department's mission by providing grants, cooperative agreements, and other assistance authorized by the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, as amended, to organizations identified in the Conference Report to accompany the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2010 (P.L. 111-117), H.R. Conf. Rep. No. 111-366 at 702-714.

Alameda County will establish the Family Visitation Center to provide therapeutic and nontherapeutic visitation in a family friendly environment that is structured towards meeting the needs of children and families where Juvenile Court dependency has been ordered. The Visitation Center will work with families whose children, primarily under the age of 18, are in foster care. The Visitation Center will be located in a community identified by zip codes in which most of the children come into care. This allows children and families to visit in familiar areas. The project will provide visitation to approximately 150 children and 100 parents in the first year of operation. The Visitation Center will be designed to address the various developmental levels of the children and to provide parents the opportunity to parent their children in a safe environment. The primary goal of the Visitation Center will be to reunify children with their birth parent(s), with an expected outcome of reducing the reentry of families into the foster care system after successful reunification. The project will offer families visitation as frequently as their schedules will allow, including evenings and weekends. Transportation services will be offered to the foster families, as transportation has been identified as a primary barrier to visitation. The project will assess performance by monitoring the amount of time and at the number of visits that occur as visitation frequency increases. Additionally, the project will report on the completion of the court ordered case plans for reunification. NCA/NCF