All Series

Each year, Fostering Media Connections hosts the Youth Voice Writing Contest — an opportunity for youth with experience in the child welfare or juvenile justice systems to write about their experiences.

May 25, 2021 marks one year since the police killing of 46-year-old George Floyd. He was a father, a Minneapolis resident and a Black man in America. The murder, which was caught on video and widely viewed, sparked global protests last summer and a national reckoning not only with racist police violence, but with the white supremacy that is embedded in American institutions.

On April 20, 2021, Ma’Khia Bryant was killed by a police officer outside of the foster home she was living in. For many Black people who have experienced the foster care system, bearing witness to Ma’Khia’s violent death as the officer’s body camera footage spread on social media has been excruciating.

When eight leading candidates vying to be mayor of New York City appear this evening for the season’s first official televised debate, they will argue over how best to manage schools, housing and police.

The National Quality Improvement Center for Adoption and Guardianship Support and Preservation (QIC-AG) is a five-year cooperative agreement, funded through the Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Children’s Bureau, designed to promote permanence when reunification is no longer a goal and improve adoption and guardianship preservation and support.

This series highlights three writers from Northern California who share their experiences dealing with foster care and how the system affects their family relationships in addition to always being place in a position to survive.

Between COVID-19 and the widely publicized incidents of police brutality in the U.S., the summer of 2020 was highly charged. We reached out to young people with systems experience across the country to see what they were thinking about and what their experiences had been when it comes to racism and policing in America.

“The thing about extended foster care is, it’s a deal, but it comes with strings attached.” Since 2008, nearly every state in America has extended foster care to age 21, an effort to help prevent the staggering levels of homelessness and criminal justice involvement experienced by those who “age out” of the system.

In 2016, the child welfare agency in Chisago County, Minnesota, took a newborn child into foster care. This series charts the agonizing four years spent by his grandmother, Latonia Rolbiecki, trying to bring the child back to his family as his foster parents pursued adoption.

“Hearings” is a series of stories from a corner of the law that is not reported on enough – America’s child welfare courts. Across the country these tribunals – often called juvenile dependency or family court – are routinely witness to some of the most high stakes legal proceedings in American jurisprudence.

The Family First Prevention Services Act has become law. It includes the biggest change to the structure of federal child welfare finance since the establishment of the Title IV-E entitlement in 1980.

At an August 2016 campaign stop, President Donald Trump made the opioid crisis part of the dismal portrait of America he purported to change. “We’re going to take all of these kids … that are totally addicted and they can’t break it,” he promised at a Columbus, Ohio, town hall meeting.

One in five California foster youth will find themselves taken away from the county where they lived and placed in another county. This three-part series looks at the experiences of some of those youth.

Underneath the tension-laden surface of national politics, there is growing agreement that the United States needs to rethink criminal justice, that the nation is over-reliant on expensive and ineffectual incarceration and short on other strategies that would lower the likelihood of continued criminal behavior.