These services are designed to help families (including adoptive and extended families) at risk or in crisis.

They include:

1. Service programs designed to help children, where safe and appropriate, return to families from which they have been removed; or
be placed for adoption, with a legal guardian, or, if adoption or legal guardianship is determined not to be safe and appropriate for a child, in some other planned, permanent living arrangement;

2. Replacement preventive services programs, such as intensive family preservation programs, designed to help children at risk of foster care placement remain safely with their families;

3. Service programs designed to provide follow-up care to families to whom a child has been returned after a foster care placement;

4. Respite care of children to provide temporary relief for parents and other caregivers (including foster parents);

5. Services designed to improve parenting skills (by reinforcing parents; confidence in their strengths, and helping them to identify where improvement is needed and to obtain assistance in improving those skills) with respect to matters such as child development, family budgeting, coping with stress, health, and nutrition.

Read more about the other services OCS provides to the families of Alaska.

If you have any questions or comments please e-mail the Family Preservation Program Coordinator.