The grant will help keep children safe with their families when they can’t stay safely with their parents
FORT WORTH, Texas (Monday, May 19, 2025)– ACH Child and Family Services (ACH) is pleased to announce it has received a grant from the Texas Bar Foundation that will help fund ACH’s Kinship Navigator program, specifically for legal services for kinship families caring for non-biological children.
Kinship Navigator helps connect families who aren’t in the child welfare system to key resources such as clothing, legal aid, training, and food in order to help care for a relative’s child. ACH strongly promotes the philosophy and practice that when children cannot be with their parents safely, the next best option is a relative such as a grandparent, aunt, uncle, sibling, or close family friend.
According to the 2020 census, for every one child in formal kinship foster care in the state of Texas, there are 24 being raised by informal kinship caregivers in Texas. These are people like grandparents who were preparing for retirement and now find themselves preparing to take care of their grandchild(ren). In virtually every case, it’s unexpected, unplanned for, and immediate.
In 2021, ACH was one of four organizations selected by the state to develop a program to connect informal kinship families to a network of resources and education. The positive outcomes resulted in making Kinship Navigator an official program alongside ACH’s Kinship Connections, which provides similar services for those within the foster system.
ACH Kinship Navigators help those who haven’t raised young children in many years – or possibly ever – overcome the hurdles of school enrollment and the documentation necessary for school—and healthcare. The program also provides training, licensure and adoption resources, and extracurricular resources. For more information, visit ACHservices.org/Kinship-Navigator.
Since its inception in 1965, the Texas Bar Foundation has awarded more than $29 million in grants to law-related programs. Supported by members of the State Bar of Texas, the Texas Bar Foundation is the nation’s largest charitably-funded bar foundation.
