Abstract
Across the United States, more than 2.5 million children are being raised in the homes of grandparents or other relatives. This is called “kinship care”—loved ones caring for a child when the parents are unable to do so. Research shows that children fare better when placed with family rather than in foster care. Yet, when families take on this caregiving role, they often do so without additional financial help or advice in navigating the systems of support available to them. This is the unique role of Kinship Navigator programs—to provide caregivers a single point of entry for connecting to financial, health, housing, and legal assistance. HALOS offers the sole Kinship Navigator program in South Carolina. Over the past year, from the time the pandemic began in March, 2020 through February, 2021, the program has reached 146 kin families and 479 kin children. As a first evaluation effort of the program, our goal is to gather an in-depth understanding of the experience of caregivers and explore preliminary evidence of the program’s impact. Our approach is a participatory evaluation, with kinship caregivers engaged in all stages of the evaluation process.