Finding support as a kinship caregiver

If you’re a grandparent or older person who’s had to take over caring for a younger family member, you’ve probably realized there’s not a lot of support out there.

Some groups are trying to change that. KIRO 7’s Ranji Sinha shows us one of them in this week’s Healthier Together.

Kiana Davis lives in the Seattle area and identifies herself as a kinship caregiver.

“I’ve been a mama auntie for close to 10 years,” she tells KIRO 7.

Reshell Wilson is also a kinship caregiver, a grandmother who took on parenting duties.

“So about 13 years ago, my stepdaughter had an issue with drugs and alcohol and schizophrenia, and the state took the kids, and they were wards of the state for a while, and my husband and I didn’t want the kids and the system, and so we decided to go to court and get third-party custody of them,” she tells KIRO 7.

Neither Davis nor Wilson is the parent of the children they’re raising. They’re part of a growing group of older adults often tasked with taking care of young children.

Both women also know that getting access to resources is hard as a non-parent raising children. Cambia Health Foundation is trying to change that.

The foundation announced $280,000 in grants to support older adult caregivers.

According to Cambia nationwide, there are more than 2.4 million children living in grand families, and 60% live with actual grandparents.

Wilson, Davis, and many others know that these families often don’t qualify for foster care assistance. Foster care assistance is often geared more towards parents.

Catholic Community Services of Western Washington helps by providing support to kinship caregiver families, and will get some of the Cambia grant money.

Wilson didn’t want her grandchildren to be wards of the state and got custody.

She knew raising them would not be easy, and was recently featured in a magazine as an unsung hero for taking on the task as parents again.

“We had a fear that if we let the state take them, they would be in and out of different homes, being around people that they don’t know, and it was easier because we were the grandparents for us to just take them,” she says. “The hardest part about that was, as it was said earlier, is just money, being able to have the resources to take care of them.”

Davis took over from her sister, who was in another state and had drug problems. CPS called and told her family they had 24 to 48 hours to find someone to take the children.

“So my story started in 2015, October. My sister was married at the time, living in Texas and she was having some problems with her husband, and I think drugs,” she told KIRO 7. “So every one of my family, my sister, my mom, were all like, who was going to get them? And I said, I will go.”

Davis said she got on a plane and got the children.

“My sister paid for a night in the hotel, so we stayed that night in the hotel. They didn’t know me, I had never really seen them. My niece at the time, my niece daughter was four years old, and my nephew son was seven, So they just went with me.” Davis said the children did not cry, but caring for them this past decade has been hard as an older aunt,“ she told KIRO 7.

These women were helped by Catholic Community Services of Western Washington when basic assistance wasn’t enough. Barb Taylor helps coordinate the program that helps kinship caregivers and says the program helps with everything from school supplies to clothes, even summer programs. It’s been 12 years that CCSWW has had a kinship program The hope is that there will be many more.