Access & Family Support

What is the Access & Family Support program?

The Foundation is funding a pilot project called Access & Family Support that aims to safely return children to their families after being in the care of the Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto (CCAS). This innovative program provides a supportive new approach to “access visits” —supervised visits between young people in care and their parents—to help strengthen parenting skills and parent-child relationships.

How it helps:

Transforming the system to safely reunite more families, faster

When the goal is to reunite families whose children are in the care of the CCAS, the current system allows for access visits. During typical access visits, children and family members meet in a designated space and where they are observed by CCAS staff, often behind a two-way mirror. This common “surveillance” model used by child welfare agencies isn’t meeting the needs of families, who often feel judged rather than supported. And, it doesn’t teach struggling parents the skills they need to repair ruptured relationships with their child or how to strengthen crucial parent-child bonds.

The Access & Family Support project reimagines access visits as opportunities for support and healing, rather than surveillance. Staff are trained to look at the whole family’s needs and then guide parents with compassion and care during their time together. When loving parents learn healthier ways to connect and bond with their children, the entire family grows stronger.

Your impact:

We need your support to help strengthen families

Government support for child welfare does not extend to developing innovative programs to improve the system, like Access & Family Support, HARP, and Youth Readiness Program. That’s why the Foundation depends on donors like you to support the CCAS in building and testing data-driven transformative programs that address issues and improve outcomes for children, youth and families involved with child welfare. 

In the next two years, the Foundation is allocating $587,000 to research, design, implement and evaluate the CCAS’s transformative new model for access visits. The initial stage of the Access & Family Support project draws on the latest research on therapeutic access programs as well as consultations with families currently receiving access.

With your support, we can rethink how access visits are structured, provide families with transparency and communication about the process, and promote a positive environment between workers and families so children can be safely reunited to their homes.