r/KinshipCare

Taking in family comes with a mountain of paperwork you didn't sign up for — visits, appointments, school stuff, meds, and every expense you're hoping to get reimbursed. I couldn't find a tool that wasn't locked to a specific agency, so I made my own.

It keeps everything on your phone (no account, nothing uploaded) and turns any date range into a clean PDF for a caseworker or court in one tap, plus a CSV of expenses/mileage for taxes. It also tracks meds with reminders and logs calls/texts for when you're documenting contact.

I'm the developer, and honestly I want to know if this fits kinship situations specifically or if I've built it too "foster-agency" shaped. What's the most frustrating part of the record-keeping for you?

My 14 year old sister was taken into state's custody recently due to severe abuse and drug use in her home (both parents are in active addiction). Reunification is highly unlikely in her situation.

She is currently visiting with me for two weeks. When I picked her up from her current foster home for this visit, I found the home to be in a very nasty state (animal excrement everywhere, lots of mold, ect). I'm not saying I expected a perfect home, but I would consider this unfit for children to live in.

She asked if she could come live with me and I am very open to the idea. I'm 35, married, and have a 12 year old daughter who loves my sister. I have a stable career and pleanty of room in my home.

I want to do anything and everything I can to help my sister. My grandma was able to take me in when this happened many years ago to me, but now our grandparents are dead and my sister doesn't have that same safety net. No other family member wants to take her.

I have two questions. My first question is - can distance hurt my chances of getting her?

We live in the same state (Tennessee) but we are about 5 hours away from each other. She's in east TN in a very rural area, I'm in west TN in Memphis. I don't want to tell my her 'yes of course you can come' - if it's unlikely the state will let her come.

My second question is what is the best way to get this process started? Do I just call the DHS office in her county? I'd like to get her here before school starts in August. Could the process move that fast?

We have a kinship situation, and the infant in our care is currently attending daycare covered by the state (Ohio). CPS has decided to file for us to have full legal custody. Mom will still have parental rights. With this filing we found out that we are going to lose the daycare coverage we currently have. JFS indicated that without the CPS protection plan they would go based off our income and circumstances which we probably will not qualify for any coverage. We also have our own child in daycare. $500 a week is insane, but the daycare does extremely well with the needs of our kinship infant and we really don’t want to have to go private but if our funding is cut we won’t have any other choice.

Any advice on if there’s a way in which we can/should be able to keep benefits while having full legal custody? Things moved way faster than they were supposed to in our situation and we thought it was going to be at least another year before they would start filing anything.

UPDATE: We got legal custody, mom signed off, CPS did ask magistrate for an extension on the Protection detail to allow us time to figure out how to go about child care. Magistrate agreed, but seemed slightly confused why our childcare coverage was hanging on by only a protection detail and asked about Kinship options and KGAP caseworker said she'd look into it. Outside of the court room when we asked about all the other kinship stipends, and other resources she just said "there's no money" so i think we'll be filing a grievance with the county asking for additional details and resources and policies to figure out what's supposed to be happening, what our options are and so on. Thank you everyone for your input! I don't think we would have necessarily accomplished what we did today without all the advice!