LAARK Turns One Year Old
KCBA Pro Bono Services is celebrating its newest program finishing up a year of providing legal services to kinship caregivers. Legal Advice and Referral for Kinship Care (LAARK) is a new statewide program funded by the state of Washington and housed within the King County Bar Association.
The LAARK program provides free guidance and legal advice over the phone to kinship caregivers statewide on matters that relate to their ability to meet physical, mental, social, educational and other needs of children and youth in their care. Topics include minor guardianship, the child welfare system, and other legal issues related to providing kinship care. LAARK is open to kinship caregivers anywhere in the state of Washington and does not have an income restriction. LAARK cannot provide representation in court. From October 2022 to October 1, 2023, LAARK has served 213 kinship caregivers from 24 counties in Washington. LAARK attorneys have provided brief services to 97 clients, and counsel and advice to 116 clients, and referred 16 of those clients to the Kinship Care Solutions Project at KCBA.
Kinship caregivers are a unique and often overlooked group in terms of their contribution to society and their legal needs. Kinship care includes relatives raising children who are not involved with the child welfare system, as well as those connected to the formal child welfare system. Children who live with their grandparents and other relatives are there for different reasons: primarily for parental opioid and substance abuse issues, incarceration, mental illness, child abuse and neglect, parental death, or military deployment. These families represent all income levels, races, and ethnicities.
Many kinship caregivers are at retirement age or older, and often are financially unprepared to provide for young children. They may be on a fixed income, or they may have health problems of their own. There are many kinship caregivers in Washington who are eligible for legal aid or who are of moderate means. The most disproportionate groups represented by kinship caregivers are Black people and Indigenous people. According to the Census Bureau, Black/African Americans make up 4.4% of Washington’s population. However, 7% of LAARK’s kinship care clients identify as Black. American Indian and Alaska Native people make up 1.9% of the state’s population, and 1.4% of LAARK’s clients have been Indigenous. Our state’s Hispanic/Latino population is 13%, and LAARK’s clients this last year have been 12% Hispanic/Latino. LAARK is tracking their client demographics and is dedicated to prioritizing race equity in its work as well as finding ways to ensure its program provides help to kinship caregivers who have been disproportionately affected by institutional racism.
Kinship caregivers have a variety of legal needs. One of the main issues they face is legal custody. For LAARK, 204 of the 213 clients served in the last year mentioned custody or minor guardianship as their main legal issue. More than half of the LAARK clients had more than one legal issue, however, and 25 clients listed three or more concurrent legal issues. The types of legal issues LAARK clients face include custody, child safety, the need for a power of attorney, health care, benefits, schooling, child welfare and CPS, adoption, housing, estate planning, SIJS, and grandparent visitation.
If a kinship caregiver is caring for children who are in the child welfare system, they are called a “formal” or “state-involved” kinship caregiver. LAARK provides advice to both formal or state-involved and informal kinship caregivers, though the vast majority (95%) of LAARK clients during the first year were informal kinship caregivers, and only 8% were involved in the state child welfare system. This slight overlap likely is due to informal kinship caregivers whose care began when CPS brought children to their home suddenly, but then a formal case was never started.
The small but mighty LAARK team consists of two full time staff attorneys, Kerry Clayman and Catherine West, one part time legal assistant, Deshanna Brown, and is overseen by Celeste Miller, the Statewide Kinship Care Legal Aid Coordinator. Information on how to apply can be found at https://www.kcba.org/For-the-Public/Free-Legal-Assistance.
1 The following numbers for total population are from the Census Bureau, while the numbers for percentage of kinship caregivers served by LAARK are from LAARK internal data.
