Foster Youth
The Trust envisions a society where families have the resources and the support they need to flourish and where youth who cannot remain with their parents have access to safe and nurturing homes and are supported to heal and thrive.
Overview
The Trust continues to support children and youth who have experienced disruption or instability in their homes with the resources, services, and connections they need to become healthy, resilient, and empowered. But we also recognize that there is much work to do to address troubling inequities in the child welfare system and to ensure that children are not removed from their homes unnecessarily. Disproportionalities, particularly for African American and Native American youth, in child welfare investigations and child removals have gone unaddressed or inadequately addressed for decades. Researchers estimate that 53% of African American children in the U.S. experience an investigation by Child Protective Services (CPS) by the age of 18 (while roughly one-third of all children experience a CPS investigation by the age of 18). [source]
These are alarming statistics not because they reveal an epidemic of abuse. They don’t. In California, for example, close to a half a million children each year are reported for suspicion of neglect or abuse, but only a small portion of these cases (13%) were substantiated after an investigation by child welfare workers. [source] Rather, these data reveal that child abuse reports and investigations are more prevalent than they need to be, and the people who are most likely to be harmed by this oversurveillance are people of color. In the instances when allegations are substantiated by child welfare workers, most cases (60-75%) are due to “neglect.” [source] Yet this “neglect” is often a result of, or exacerbated by, poverty and many of these families could likely have avoided engagement with the child welfare system if they had access to sufficient and comprehensive resources and support. Accordingly, the Trust's grantmaking in the next five years will evolve to support efforts to reduce the overrepresentation of children of color in the child welfare system and reduce unnecessary contact with the child welfare system for all families in addition to supporting safe and stable homes, foster youth wellbeing, and transitions to successful adulthoods.