Fostering Adults

Attempting to prove to a Santa Clara County court late last year that she had earned her monthly foster care check, a South Bay teenager couldn’t quite remember all the places she had applied for work.

On a recent weeknight on the suburban streets of Silicon Valley, a 20-year-old former foster youth offered a weary and frank assessment of his latest struggles to survive. Peter had recently scrounged up $600 to buy a barely functional “classic old hippie van” he planned to live in — that was until he got pulled over at midnight for driving without a registration.

Just weeks before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered schools and businesses and isolated millions of people in their homes, a California senator introduced groundbreaking legislation to reimagine how the state supports some of its most vulnerable, yet hopeful, residents: Young adults raised in foster care.