"Beyond Placement: Fostering Lifelong Support and Belonging": Expert Insights from Lived Experience Leaders
The National Foster Care Youth & Alumni Policy Council creates recommendations that child welfare leaders, workers, and policymakers can use to improve and support lifelong connections for young people in and from foster care. The Council's first priorities created in 2012 elevated the need for preparation for and meaningful engagement of young people in their own permanency.
This year, Council Members continued to raise awareness and provide education on actions that can be taken to support lifelong connections of children and youth in foster care. Members pressed for urgent action:
“Having someone who not only believed in but supported the growth of self-belief in my worth, voice, and ability to thrive has pushed my life onto a positive path that's unstoppable.”
— Former foster youth, 23, Pennsylvania
The Council pulled these recommendations from priorities: Decriminalize Being in Foster Care and Reducing Vulnerability of Foster Youth to Predators and Sex Trafficking.
- Training for foster parents, congregate care staff, and all others caring for foster youth on the adultification bias, youth brain development, and de-escalation strategies. Teach restorative justice practices to support positive outcomes.
- Supportive interactions, as opposed to punitive ones, can promote healthy relationships between foster youth and adults in their lives, contributing to stability, healing, and permanency.
- Create a response system so that foster youth, caregivers, and others can request immediate help in a crisis.
- Support us in healing: Giving youth the support to process experiences of sexual abuse not only helps them address these symptoms but may also prevent them from being re-victimized
- Educate and inform us. We must ensure foster youth know that simply being in care can leave them more vulnerable
- Provide us with comprehensive mental health support and services
States and jurisdictions can look to promising practices, such as the Quality Parenting Initiative, Family Urgent Response System (24/7 helpline), Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) Caregiver Training, and the CORE Teen Curriculum. Additional training and resources to support caregivers and youth include: the National Safe Place Network and California’s CSEC Training.
The Council pulled these recommendations from priorities: Supporting Immigrant Children & Youth in Foster Care and A Historic Opportunity to Reform the Child Welfare System: Youth & Alumni Priorities on Older Youth Successful Transition to Adulthood.
- Prevent unnecessary entry into foster care
- Support youth in understanding and engaging in the decision-making process for their permanency
- Protect youth ties with their families, practice of their religion, and connection to their culture
- Educate youth on their rights
- Ensure your state/jurisdiction/tribe requires and provides legal representation through an attorney or multi-disciplinary legal team to all children and youth in foster care. Non-attorney’s should not replace attorney’s
- Train all legal representatives on meaningful youth engagement and supporting youth agency in decision making
Leaders and workers can utilize peer delivered workshops such as Know Your Rights through FosterClub, comprehensive resource guides such as this one from AdvoKids. We recommend review and updating of state’s/jurisdiction’s bill of rights for foster youth in partnership with young people; an example we appreciate is Arizona’s bill of rights.
The National Association of Counsel for Children has a Counsel for Kids resource that advocates can use to understand how their state or jurisdiction currently provide legal representation to young people in foster care. States, tribes and jurisdictions can use federal funds (Title IV-E) to cover costs for child and parent legal representation; the American Bar Association has compiled a report on which areas are currently utilizing these funds.
The Council pulled these recommendations from priorities: Improving Social Capital for Youth in Foster Care and Improving Policies and Services in Congregate Care Settings: Our Priorities.
- Child welfare professionals should continue to assess the relationships a foster youth has.
- Regularly ASK youth “Who do you have a positive or supportive relationship with?”
- Caregivers should encourage and be in regular and reasonable communication with the biological family
- Provide an individual wellbeing plan in the case plan and ensure all youth are provided space to explore their individuality, and be affirming of culture, ethnic, SOGIE, and religious identities. Outcomes should be monitored.
- Train staff about teenage brain development and equip them to help young people work through grief and loss
- Maintaining connection and permanent supportive people in their lives beyond their current living placement/situation while also pursuing individual autonomy in alignment with their current life stage.
Deeper understanding of the critical importance of relationships for young people can be found in reflections of youth in the Away from Home report by Think of Us. Connections for foster youth can be protected under Sibling Bill of Rights, such as the one that Colorado has adopted. Caseworkers and other child welfare professionals can utilize tools such as Family Search Strategies (recommended by Casey Family Programs), a coloring book designed to help young children entering foster care identify who is important in their lives called Foster Cub by FosterClub, and support relatives caring for youth through Kinship Navigator Programs. Tools such as FosterClub’s Transition Toolkit invite teens and young adults to understand permanence, identify supportive adults, cultivate healthy relationships and navigate connection or reconnection to biological family.