Improving Access to Support Services for Teens in Foster Care

All young peo­ple deserve sup­port as they pur­sue edu­ca­tion, obtain employ­ment, main­tain sta­ble hous­ing and pre­pare to be suc­cess­ful adults. Yet too few teens and young adults in fos­ter care receive the fed­er­al­ly fund­ed ser­vices offered by child wel­fare agen­cies intend­ed to do just that.

A Dec. 5 Insta­gram Live con­ver­sa­tion fea­tur­ing the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Todd Lloyd, senior asso­ciate for Child Wel­fare Pol­i­cy, explored approach­es to ensur­ing more young peo­ple get and ben­e­fit from these crit­i­cal resources.

Watch the conversation

Join­ing Lloyd was Hope Coop­er, cam­paign man­ag­er for the advo­ca­cy cam­paign Jour­ney to Suc­cess, which seeks improve­ments to fos­ter care poli­cies and ser­vices. Also par­tic­i­pat­ing was Jor­dan Otero, a young leader with fos­ter care expe­ri­ence. Otero is an L.E.A.D. ambas­sador at Fos­ter Suc­cess in Indi­ana, a Jim Casey Youth Oppor­tu­ni­ties Ini­tia­tive^® site. Fos­ter Suc­cess and oth­er sites in the Foundation’s Jim Casey Ini­tia­tive work to ensure young peo­ple ages 14 to 26 have access to the rela­tion­ships, resources and oppor­tu­ni­ties they need to thrive.

Twen­ty-five years ago, land­mark fed­er­al leg­is­la­tion estab­lished the John H. Chafee Fos­ter Care Pro­gram for Suc­cess­ful Tran­si­tion to Adult­hood. Though many states use the Chafee program’s fed­er­al dol­lars to help young peo­ple in and tran­si­tion­ing from fos­ter care, recent data show per­sis­tent lim­i­ta­tions in pro­vid­ing vital train­ing and resources, such as:

• hous­ing vouchers;
• edu­ca­tion aid; and
• employ­ment training.

Accord­ing to the Foundation’s report Fos­ter­ing Youth Tran­si­tions 2023: State and Nation­al Data to Dri­ve Fos­ter Care Advo­ca­cy, few­er than a quar­ter of eli­gi­ble teens and young adults received one or more Chafee ser­vices in 2021.

Coop­er and Otero shared how their orga­ni­za­tions use data, includ­ing feed­back from young peo­ple with fos­ter care expe­ri­ence, to iden­ti­fy gaps in the state ser­vices that pre­pare youth for inde­pen­dent liv­ing and advo­cate for improvements.

Watch the Insta­gram Live conversation

Learn more about the eco­nom­ic well-being of youth tran­si­tion­ing from fos­ter care