Transforming Los Angeles County Foster Care

Support for foster and systems-impacted youth

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

Stable placements in nurturing family homes are foundational to ensuring children and youth in foster care thrive. In stable placements, they experience connection and the opportunity to build healthy relationships that can endure beyond their time in care, resulting in improved overall well-being. Stable placements also enable school stability, resulting in better educational outcomes, and continuity in health care services, resulting in improved physical and mental health outcomes. This is critical as children and youth in foster care have experienced abuse and neglect that can lead to significant health and educational challenges in comparison to their peers.
On average, youth in foster care move to a new home every 9 months. Their lives are upended as they repeatedly change homes, schools, doctors, and other care providers. Despite the harm caused by these continuous disruptions, efforts to improve placement stability are rarely driven by youth and caregiver voice and choice.

Children Now proposes launching a new partnership that brings together LA County youth with lived foster care experience and caregivers to understand the barriers to stable placements and identify opportunities for meaningful change. Their collaboration is a critical, yet missing, piece to driving truly effective improvements for foster families. This partnership will enable youth and caregivers to collectively design and advocate for holistic solutions to placement instability.
Specifically, Children Now will conduct a series of countywide activities that will build upon each other to develop youth and caregiver mutual understanding, identify common ground, and develop shared ideas to strengthen placement stability. To launch this effort, we will disseminate youth- and caregiver-specific surveys countywide to identify both areas of concern and consensus. The survey findings will be used to frame and guide separate youth and caregiver focus groups that Children Now will conduct to delve deeper into the existing issues and changes needed to improve placement stability for children and youth as identified by the community. Following these early information gathering efforts, we will bring youth and caregivers together for a series of facilitated events designed to grow rapport, provide a space to share perspectives, reach consensus on solutions, and strategize how to move solutions forward in consultation with other local child welfare stakeholders.

This project will demonstrate how, when the time is taken to encourage collaboration, youth with lived experience in foster care and caregivers share significant interests and can unite to be a powerful force for policy change. The collective power built through this first-of-its-kind partnership will help secure local system changes that will both improve placement stability and establish a sustainable advocacy pathway for youth and caregivers on behalf of LA County’s foster families.
In the long-term, the coalition’s sustained efforts will result in systemic changes that improve education, health, housing, employment, social connection, and well-being outcomes for youth in foster care, with an overall goal of decreasing the total annual number of LA County’s placement changes (currently around 2,000) by 50% or more. The partnership will also establish a new normal for how youth and caregivers can engage in advocacy and ensure their experiences inform meaningful change.

Children Now has long partnered with youth- and caregiver-led organizations to improve the lives of children and youth in foster care and their caregivers. Our most recent collaboration in late 2023 was a one-day pilot of the concept outlined in this proposal. Through this process, we identified best practices and collected valuable feedback from participants that we will employ throughout this project. Success will be defined by the establishment of an LA youth and caregiver coalition by the end of the grant period. To evaluate the project, Children Now and participating youth and caregivers will jointly identify and monitor performance measures to ensure efforts are having their intended impact and to modify activities as needed. Performance measures may include: number of participants consistently engaged in activities, number of events held, youth and caregiver satisfaction ratings, and progress towards solutions and opportunities to move proposals forward.