walter s johnson foundation

Update: The proposal to waive tuition and fees for Nevada foster youth was passed by the Nevada System of Higher Education’s Board of Regents on Sept. 6. The Board also decided to expand eligibility for the waiver to any student who have spent time any in foster care since age 14, rather than 16 as originally proposed.

After launching at the White House and building steam in New York City, the intersection of tech and foster care has made it to the mother ship in northern California. Yesterday kicked off the two-day Silicon Valley Hack Foster Care Summit, the latest event in a growing movement to the foster care and technology communities together to hack the system.

Early next year, when it hosts its own “Hack Foster Care Summit,” Silicon Valley will pick up the baton in the third leg of what is becoming a national effort to better use technology to improve the lives of children and youth in foster care.

Sixto Cancel is in his early 20s, African American, gay, and grew up in several Connecticut foster homes. I am middle aged, a Taiwanese immigrant, a former Girl Scout leader, and I live in Albany, California with my husband and two kids.

This week, the California Child Welfare Co-Investment Partnership released a summary of their recent research and analysis efforts, entitled “Crossover Youth: A Shared Responsibility.” The first two sections of the report begin with two statistics on California youth: first, “there were 496,972 reports of [child] neglect and abuse in 2014, with 81,391 substantiated,” and second, “there were 101,531 young people referred to juvenile probation in 2014.”

In the New Industries Building on Alcatraz Island, window panes that have broken in the years since the prison closed have been left shattered. Walking through the exhibit The Sentence Unseen: Portraits of Resilience, which opened there on June 13, the crumbling space could be seen as a reminder of the devastation to families when a parent goes to prison.

Helping foster youth succeed in higher education was the focus of the 2013 Blueprint Conference held in Los Angeles over two days in October. The John Burton Foundation, which manages the  California College Pathways Initiative, produced the sold-out event that brought professionals from 15 states to learn, share and find solutions.

Foster youth in five rural Northern California counties will soon benefit from increased investments in a program aimed at boosting the number of college graduates who experienced foster care. Three colleges recently formed the Northern California Foster Youth Higher Education Network to bring college support services to foster youth studying on their campuses.