Victoria Walker knows a thing or two about staying flexible. This Nashville grandmother is raising seven grandchildren, ages six to fifteen. Even with osteoporosis and two injured shoulders, Mrs. Walker still manages to turn herself inside out to keep her family together. "I didn't want them to go to strangers and lose each other forever," she says. "They didn't ask for this."

For the last five years, Mrs. Walker has struggled to keep her grandchildren out of foster care, relying on her disability check and $848 per month in public aid -- $4 per day to cloth, feed and house each child. When her home was condemned, however, she turned to the Department of Children's Services (DCS) for help.

Mrs. Walker soon found that, despite its best intentions, the state agency didn't have the same flexibility. Because she had stepped in to care for her grandchildren to prevent them from being abused and neglected, she was told, they were not eligible for foster care, a state-supervised placement that would pay a minimum of $400 per child per month. Her other choice was to submit an abuse and neglect report, but the agency warned her that if she placed the children in the state's care, they might be removed from her home and divided among several foster families.

Mrs. Walker has since negotiated an agreement to keep her grandchildren and obtain increased agency support, but her story is all too common among the grandparents and other relatives raising children whose parents struggle with substance abuse, incarceration, mental illness, domestic violence and other serious problems.

More than 61,000 Tennessee grandparents report that they are responsible for grandchildren living with them (approximately 5,000 in Nashville alone). In 42% of these households, there are no parents present to help with child-rearing or to contribute to the family's income, a particularly serious problem for disabled grandparents, retired grandparents living on a fixed income and the one-fifth of Tennessee grandparent caregivers who live under the poverty line.

The lack of comprehensive services for Tennessee kinship families is due, in large part, to the chronically inflexible national foster-care financing system, which provides Tennessee with more than $155 million per year in federal aid but places significant restrictions on how the money can be spent. For example, the state can use Title IV-E, the main source of federal child welfare support, mainly to fund room and board for children in foster care but cannot use it for prevention and post-permanency services, including programs to help grandparents and other relatives who have stepped forward to prevent abuse and neglect or to provide permanent homes for children who are already in foster care.

Despite these perverse federal funding incentives, however, there is new hope for grandparent caregivers. Recently, the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care, a national panel of child welfare experts, laid out some promising solutions to reform the national child welfare financing structure. The recommendations also aim toward improving child welfare oversight by the courts because judges play a critical role but are often uninformed or misinformed about the consequences of their well-intentioned decisions.

In particular, the commission recommends that states should be permitted to use the federal money they don't spend on foster care and reinvest it in programs that help keep children out of foster care and, in other cases, help children exit foster care more quickly into safe and permanent homes. In Mrs. Walker's case, for example, the state would have the flexibility to transfer its unused foster-care funds to give her grandchildren the help they need without placing them in foster care.

The Pew recommendations would also help the more than 1,600 Tennessee children who are currently in foster care under the direct supervision of grandparents and other relatives. In some of these cases, relatives may be willing to assume permanent responsibility for the children in their care. Because they do not want to undermine family and cultural norms, however, many are hesitant to adopt, a legal proceeding that requires the termination of parental rights.

Under the Pew proposal, states would be able to use federal funding to pay for subsidized guardianship, a legal arrangement in which relatives obtain legal guardianship of the children in their care and receive ongoing financial assistance -- payments that are currently available only to eligible adoptive families.

When it comes to helping kinship families, Tennessee has come a long way. In partnership with local organizations, DCS established the innovative Relative Caregiver Program to provide support groups, recreational activities and limited financial support to grandparents and other relative caregivers in 16 counties. In addition, the Tennessee General Assembly recently passed a law that makes it easier for grandparents and other caring adults to get the decision-making authority they need to enroll children under their care in school, consent to medical care and obtain other vital services.

However, until the necessary changes are made at the federal level, grandparents and other relative caregivers too often must choose between keeping their families together and getting the services their children need most. In the meantime, though, Mrs. Walker and thousands like her choose to keep the faith. "The Lord chose me special to render a service for these children and to him," says Mrs. Walker, "And they are my future."