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The woman used a thick extension cord on her foster children. Welts rose. Bruises formed. Fear became the norm inside the Watts neighborhood home in Los Angeles where LaToya Cooper and six other children were sent to live. But no one believed the then-fifth grader. Not Cooper’s teachers. Not the police. [For more on this story by Susan Abram, go to https://chronicleofsocialchange.org/child-welfare-2/california-considers-a-bat-signal-for-foster-youth-in-distress/30903 ]

As a teenager , Jose Colmenares spent time sleeping on the streets of Los Angeles as a runaway before ending up in a group home for foster youth. Besides missing many days of school, he missed out on important conversations about how he would plan for the future, including developing a career. At the group home where he lived from age 15 to 18, he remembers listening to many panel discussions about drug abuse, but never about careers. Colmenares had always been fascinated by technology, but...

Doniesha Thomas is in her bedroom, crouching on the floor and peering into a pet carrier that appears empty. “He’s in there, all the way back,” she said, reaching in to find the kitten she rescued from a nearby vacant lot the day before, though she says she dislikes cats. Thomas’ bedroom is in her house. Her house, rented in her own name. It’s a single-family dwelling in south central LA that she shares with her fiancé and a roommate. [For more of this story, written by Lauren Lee White, go...

As a teen mom in foster care with a baby of her own, New Yorker RaiLei Girard resolved never to become “known.” To be “known” meant possibly having her own child placed in foster care — to be accused of child neglect or abuse, then becoming “known” to a child welfare system that takes children from teen moms in foster care at an alarmingly high rate. Girard, who entered foster care at age 3, avoided that outcome. But another challenge emerged raising her son in her foster parents’ home. [For...

Discusses the importance of identifying and implementing effective strategies for self-care in dealing with the emotional challenges of working with infants, young children, and their caregivers who have been traumatized. https://www.nctsn.org/resources/emotional-challenges-and-self-care-those-working-young-traumatized-children

Denise Goodman has been trying to figure out how to recruit foster parents for a long time. “I once recruited a foster home for Moses,” she joked in an interview with The Chronicle of Social Change. She’s actually been working in child welfare for more than 40 years, including 32 years understanding the art and science of foster parent recruitment and retention. (She’s also served as a foster parent herself.) Since 1992, she has worked as a consultant for the Annie E. Casey Foundation. [For...

This year, Fostering Media Connections (FMC) launched its first-ever Youth Voice nonfiction writing contest and invited current and former foster youth between the ages of 18 and 24 to submit essays. This year’s theme: “What love is.” Dozens of youth entered the contest from all over the United States. The winning essays appear in the May/June issue of Fostering Families Today (FMC’s magazine for foster parents). Following is a piece by our Second Place winner, Sierra Howard. Check back...

A new federal law, propelled by the belief that children in difficult homes nearly always fare best with their parents, effectively blows up the nation’s troubled foster care system. Few outside child welfare circles paid any mind to the law, which was tucked inside a massive spending bill President Donald Trump signed in February. But it will force states to overhaul their foster care systems by changing the rules for how they can spend their annual $8 billion in federal funds for child...

“I told them we were being taken and I didn’t know where we were going and when we were coming back.” That’s how Kaysie, then 14, recalls telling her friends about the fact that she and her siblings were headed to foster care. What was supposed to be a weekend stay turned into seven years in the system. The words strength and resilience are often used to characterize youth in care. They got through it because they are tough, they’re successful because they have grit. We want to find reasons...

In 2012, following more than a decade of significant decline, the number of American children in foster care began rising. Between 2012 and 2016, the number of children in foster care nationally has increased by more than 10 percent. There is broad agreement that the ongoing opioid epidemic has been a primary contributor to those increases. Now, a recent research brief issued by the U.S Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and...

"Fixing our foster care crisis” was made possible through major funding from the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona and additional support from the University of Southern California Annenberg Center's Fund for Journalism on Child Well-being. They call it the “miracle question.” In Michigan’s Family Reunification Program, it’s asked of parents who’ve lost custody of their kids because of abuse or neglect and are about to be reunited as a family. If you were to wake up, and none of this...

In the last 20 years, there’s been a noticeable uptick in the size and reach of foster care alumni networking organizations and events nationwide. Shalita O’Neale has been an active participant in this movement while running her company, Fostering Change Network LLC (FCN). After O’Neale’s mother died when she was 2, the Baltimore, Maryland, native shuttled between family members until officially entering the foster care system at age 13. She has spent her career using that experience to try...