The Child and Biological Family Program of The Martin Pollak Project is designed to ensure that all children entering the MPP foster care program have optimal opportunity to retain social and emotional involvement and their biological family and the resource this network contains. The services offered support the psychological and psychosocial well being associated with sustaining family and kinship attachments. These relationships have specific health and wellness enhancing capability intrinsic to biological family involvement. Tangible continuity in relationships with family and relatives is especially essential for the child in foster care.

The importance of permanency for children in foster care is well documented. Despite the federal and state laws designed to support permanency for children in foster care “foster care drift” continues to be a problem. The child welfare literature is unambiguous about the practices that help to prevent foster care drift. These practices are:

• specific programming focused on the empowering birth parents
• maintaining frequent and substantive involvement between children in care and their families including siblings
• systematic involvement of foster parents in support of ongoing connection between children and their families.  

The Martin Pollak Project has implemented the Child and Biological Family Program to address these issues. 

This program also intends to lower risk for multiple placement of children in foster care by supporting adaptive function in the foster home with the emotional/ social support and resources embodied in the natural family network.