Connecticut’s Kinship Navigator Program
Partnering to Raise Resilient Children
ConnectiKIN (or C-KIN) is partnering with kinship caregivers to provide connections, supports, and resources needed to raise resilient children who thrive.
Why Kinship Navigation?
Kinship caregivers provide comfort, familiarity, and stability when a child needs it most. It’s a vital role, but it can be challenging. Kinship Navigation from C-KIN helps ensure caregivers can access resources and services they need to succeed.
What Does C-KIN do?
Kinship Navigators take direction from caregivers, based on their needs, and offer support without interfering in how children are raised.
Kinship Navigators offer:
- Access to public and private resources that can help with essential needs, including guidance in finding child care; resources and donations for diapers, clothing, and food.
- Support with accessing financial assistance as well as access to physical and mental health services and navigating the educational system.
- Support with finding community resources, including connection with legal assistance.
- Navigating the child welfare system, for example, links with other kinship caregivers for peer support.
How C-KIN Works
Voluntary & Flexible
Caregivers choose the amount of support they receive: no support, information only (brief/short term) or a more hands-on partnership with ongoing, interactions.
Understanding
Caregivers are connected to dedicated Kinship Navigators who are empathetic, family-focused, strengths-based and knowledgeable about:
- Self-Care
- Permanency and Reunification
- DCF / Foster Care Licensing
- Referrals to Community Services Grief and Loss
- Family Dynamics and Role Changes
- Traumatized Children
- Intergenerational Trauma
- Stress Management
- Parenting Techniques and Attachment
- Addiction and Recovery
- Intimate Partner Violence
Individualized
Kinship Navigators assess caregiver and children’s needs together with families to create customized goals and support plans.
Our Visual Identity
Our visual identity portrays two hearts joining together and forming a home. It represents the essential relationships we form every day and our core belief in the power and resilience of family. The two hearts can stand for the connection between CKIN and families, families and children or biological families and the extended family or friends who help them.
To learn more, contact Anne Russo, LPC, program manager, at 860.793.7255.