Diakon receives fourth five-year contract to manage Statewide Adoption & Permanency Network
Harrisburg, PA (Thursday October 15, 2015)
The Pennsylvania Department of Human Services has awarded a fourth five-year contract to Diakon, in partnership with Family Design Resources, Inc., to manage Pennsylvania’s Statewide Adoption & Permanency Network, known as SWAN.
Diakon and Family Design Resources have partnered to serve as the SWAN prime contractor for the Commonwealth since 2000. During that time, 27,706 children have been adopted from the child welfare system.
SWAN is a public-private partnership devoted to achieving permanency for children in foster care. SWAN involves state, county and private agencies coordinating the delivery of permanency services to children in Pennsylvania who are in the custody of county children and youth agencies and post-permanency supportive services to families.
During the last five-year period, management of the SWAN program recorded a number of significant achievements, says Lisa Stum, contracts administrator of SWAN for Diakon. Among those achievements were expansion and maintenance of resources supporting adoption and foster care in Pennsylvania including revision and updating of benchmarks, creation of a “permanency toolkit” for adoption agencies, development of online and interactive direct-service training modules for adoption staff, and further expansion of the SWAN Legal Services Initiative, which provides county-based legal staff to assist in achieving permanency options including adoption.
In addition, the Diakon-FDR partnership has overseen revision of the first SWAN information portal, which brought together data on children and families previously existing in 11 independent data systems, to create a single-record system that streamlines adoption and foster care efforts.
“We are delighted the Commonwealth has selected us to continue to administer the SWAN program,” says Stum. “We look forward to another five years of continued efforts to find permanent family arrangements for the more than 1,100 Pennsylvania children and youths who wait for a place to call home.”
For further information, please contact:
William Swanger, M.A., APR
Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications
Diakon Lutheran Social Ministries
(717) 795-0308
E-mail: swangerb@diakon.org
