US: Unfinished Business: The Ongoing Issues of the Foster Care System (Commentary)
Imprint – July 18, 2023
I am an aged-out youth from foster care that is lucky, and when I say this, I am not using this term loosely. How the system has constantly plagued and destroyed children and families is a tragedy. To think that one would be taken out of the care of an adult struggling to look after you and then be placed into a hostile and volatile environment with individuals who are not fit is saddening. There are ongoing issues within the system, problems that scratch way further down than just the tip of the surface.
https://imprintnews.org/youth-voice/unfinished-business-the-ongoing-issues-of-the-foster-care-system/243045

US: Congress Completes Busy Week on Housing Appropriations
National Association of Home Builders – July 20, 2023
The Senate Appropriations Committee today approved its Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies fiscal year 2024 funding bill, and the measure includes $70.06 billion for HUD. The Senate bill also maintains critical support for HUD rental assistance programs, which assist nearly 5 million vulnerable households – more than half of whom are elderly or people with disabilities. This includes $31.7 billion for tenant-based Section 8 vouchers – a $1.5 billion increase above fiscal year 2023 – which includes funding to make 4,000 new incremental vouchers available to youth aging out of foster care and veterans at risk of or experiencing homelessness. The House bill provides $31.13 billion for this program.
https://www.nahb.org/blog/2023/07/hud-spending

US: Tax tips for new parents (Press release)
U.S. Internal Revenue Service – July 10, 2023
Kids are expensive. Whether someone just brought a bundle of joy home from the hospital, adopted a teen from foster care, or is raising their grandchild. There are several tax breaks that can help.
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/tax-tips-for-new-parents

US: Tracking Efforts to Pass State-Level ICWA Laws
Imprint – July 10, 2023
The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was passed in 1978 as an effort to curtail the disproportionate numbers of Native children being removed from their parents and placed with white adoptive families or sent to boarding schools designed to assimilate them to white culture. When the law was passed, as many as one-third of Indigenous children were torn from their families and tribal communities by the child welfare system. The bedrock law requires states to make active efforts to prevent the removal of Native children into foster care, and for those who are taken from their parents, it requires a placement preference be given to extended family members or fellow tribe members. But the recent Supreme Court case Brackeen v. Haaland threatened to overturn part or all of the law. In June, the justices voted 7-2 to uphold the law, but the uncertainty leading up to the ruling triggered a flurry of state-level legislation to locally codify ICWA.
https://imprintnews.org/youth-services-insider/tracking-efforts-to-pass-state-level-icwa-laws/241211

US: Kids Awaiting Foster Care Placement Are Being “Housed” in Jails and Offices
Truthout – July 12, 2023
By age 17, more than half of youth who are removed from their homes will have an encounter with the legal system through arrest, conviction or detention. Critics describe this process as the foster-care-to-prison-pipeline. But for many foster children, the pipeline is activated the moment they enter care. This is because child welfare authorities in several states are placing kids in juvenile detention facilities – as well as in hotels, casinos and offices – due to a shortage of foster homes. They literally have not found other places to send them. According to National Public Radio, more than half of U.S. states have seen a decline in the number of licensed foster homes since 2021. Child welfare advocates blame several factors for the decline: people’s reluctance to take strangers into their homes due to COVID, and the 2019 passage of the Family First Prevention Services Act, a bill that was meant to boost the number of kinship placements with relatives and family friends and phase out congregate care settings, including group homes, that warehouse youth and have been rife with reported abuse.
https://truthout.org/articles/kids-awaiting-foster-care-placement-are-being-housed-in-jails-and-offices/

US: The Need to Prioritize Relational Health (Opinion)
Imprint – July 11, 2023
Child welfare in the United States is both a symptom and a cause of relational poverty. As a symptom, it reflects what can happen when families are socially isolated and without the necessary social capital or resources to help them through adversity. As a cause, it erodes family integrity. With intention, laws have been crafted to punish vulnerability, expedite the severance of family relationships and incentivize the redistribution of other people’s children. Less than half of children separated from their parents to foster care ever return home. Discriminatory rules and policies disqualify families from doing what families do best – care for their loved ones. The “better safe than sorry” mentality toward child safety continues to preempt a child’s sense of connection and belonging to their family, community and culture. This is a direct threat to the well-being of children and youth and jeopardizes their relational, physical, mental, and spiritual health. Relational health – the sense of connection, belonging and relationships that people have – is essential to our individual and collective well-being as human beings in the world. Somehow, however, this most essential and defining aspect of being human has been overshadowed or cast aside in the industry known as child welfare.
https://imprintnews.org/opinion/the-need-to-prioritize-relational-health/242912

US: Foster Youth Are Sleeping in Jails, Offices, and Hotels Thanks to Flawed Federal Reforms (Opinion) (May require subscription) (Includes audio) (Includes video)
Newsweek – July 14, 2023
The highest-needs children in America’s foster care system will go to bed tonight in jail despite not facing criminal charges. Luckier kids will be assigned a budget hotel room. Others will wedge a cot or inflatable mattress between cubicles or beside a conference table. This is what it means to be a foster kid with complex behavioral, mental, and physical needs in a funding and regulatory climate that leaves state child welfare agencies with no good options. Something has gone wrong in a child’s life for them to enter the foster system. People closest to them or circumstances sometimes beyond anyone’s control let them down. For me, it was an alcoholic mother and a volatile procession of would-be stepfather figures. But my story isn’t unique, and many are far more harrowing, like the three young children who police delivered to my foster family after their father murdered their mother before turning the gun on himself.
https://www.newsweek.com/foster-youth-are-sleeping-jails-offices-hotels-thanks-flawed-federal-reforms-opinion-1812823

NY: NY Law Would Allow Parents to Stay in Touch with Kids After Losing Legal Rights
Imprint – July 06, 2023
Legislation again passed by New York lawmakers would allow some people who have lost parental rights to contact their children in the future – even when kids have been adopted into other families. Under the Preserving Family Bonds Act, S6720, such contact would have to be approved by a judge and determined to be in the child’s “best interest.” Similar versions of the bill have been vetoed by two governors in recent years. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) rejected last year’s version of the bill, because she said it didn’t offer adoptive parents “full rights” or “finality” in the creation of their new families. The bill’s Senate sponsor, Sen. Jabari Brisport (D), said that the Legislature could pursue a supermajority to override Hochul’s decision if she vetoes the bill again.
https://imprintnews.org/top-stories/ny-law-would-allow-parents-to-stay-in-touch-with-kids-after-losing-legal-rights/242783

NY: ‘It takes a village’: Foster families needed in N.Y. (Includes video) (May require subscription)
Spectrum News 1 – July 07, 2023
Offering a child a loving home, whether for a few hours or for years to come – that’s the goal of foster parents across the country. With more than 391,000 kids in foster care, there’s always a need. “This is from their first year in school,” said Micah Golba, as he looked at his kids’ art. here’s plenty of love to go around in the Golba household, with four kids: Terence, Emilia, Rita and Ezra. Two are their own and two were adopted.
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/news/2023/07/07/-it-takes-a-village—foster-families-needed-in-western-ny