Minnesota’s only statewide advocacy group to address foster youth’s needs has a new executive director who is now seeking feedback in advance of next year’s lawmaking session.
Nikki Beasley, 50, spent eight years in foster care as a child. Her career over 20 years has involved working with youth who’ve experienced family conflict, homelessness and sex trafficking. Most recently, she directed services for women impacted by domestic violence, helping them navigate legal and housing challenges and find employment.
Founded five years ago to address a lack of advocacy on behalf of Minnesota foster youth, Foster Advocates has worked to support legislation and to inform lawmakers and the public about the needs of those raised in the child welfare system.
Members of Foster Advocates conduct outreach campaigns, post relevant research on social media, testify at state capitol hearings, lobby lawmakers and partner with community members and local nonprofits. In coming weeks, they will host listening sessions with current and former foster youth to learn more about their needs and issues they want state leaders to address.
In recent years, the group’s advocacy helped pass the Fostering Higher Education Act, signed into law in 2021. The law allows foster youth a chance to attend any accredited Minnesota university free of charge. A second successful bill the organization worked on created a statewide ombuds office for foster care.
As a result, on Sept. 14, the state’s first-ever Foster Youth Ombudsperson was named. In a press announcement, Democratic Gov. Tim Walz noted Misty Coonce was chosen after a “competitive application process and multiple rounds of panel interviews.” Her office will “investigate decisions, acts, and other matters related to the health, safety, and welfare of youth in foster care.” Coonce brings personal experience to the job, as an adoptee from the Minnesota foster care system whose family provided kinship care to other relatives during her upbringing.
Gov. Walz described Coonce as “an advocate and champion for children in Minnesota’s foster care system.” Her appointment represents another successful lobbying campaign by Foster Advocates.
Beasley brings her own experience to her new role at the organization. She began working with homeless youth in 1999, immediately after receiving her master’s degree in counseling and psychotherapy from the Adler Graduate School in Minnetonka. Her work history includes 13 years with The Bridge for Youth homeless shelter and the St. Paul YWCA, whose mission centers on “empowering women, eliminating racism, and overcoming barriers.” Before joining Foster Advocates, she served as the director of housing stability services at Women’s Advocates, also in St. Paul. She takes over for Hoang Murphy, a former foster youth and high school teacher who founded the organization but has since moved on to a two-year fellowship with the Bush Foundation.
At Foster Advocates, Beasley said she will work on the precariousness of housing for foster youth, and help prepare them not only for college but for post-graduate degrees and careers. Other key areas of focus will include encouraging health and wellness — from mental health care to relief from chemical dependency — and supporting young people to safely express their gender identities.
Through it all, in a conversation with The Imprint excerpted below, she said she remains committed to young people, who she calls her “favorite group of people.”
This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity and length.
Your expertise is in therapy and counseling for people who have survived domestic violence, homelessness and sex trafficking. What modalities have you found to be the most effective for adults and children who are working to overcome traumatic experiences?
The best way to support young people is using the harm reduction model. Not just for chemical health or mental health, but in working with those who have been trafficked. You really need support and help along the way to get out of situations that they see that they feel trapped in. Just like those that are in recovery from addictions, it’s a process. Sometimes it’s about how do I do less harm today?
By transferring that same ideology to those that are surviving domestic violence, and those that are surviving human trafficking, it’s: What’s the one thing I can do today? Maybe I’m not quite ready to leave, maybe I’m scared to leave. But what’s something I can do today toward that end?
So that’s the kind of the model that I use, even in my personal life, talking with friends and family if they’re in a dilemma. Oftentimes it’s about listening and hearing, and then also helping them figure out, what’s one thing they can do?
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Tell me what some of your initial efforts at Foster Advocates will be.
Well right now, we’ve recently launched the Minnesota Promise. What we’re attempting to do is have these listening sessions in different regions of the state, where we’re actually making a call out to “fosters” in those areas, because we know that the people with the answers are those that are the most impacted.
Our hope is after we’re done with the listening sessions that we will have a pretty comprehensive report about the state of Minnesota, and what fosters are saying that they need and highlighting the ways in which we, as a state, aren’t meeting that need and what are we going to do about it. That’s the ultimate goal of the Minnesota Promise.
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Now that the state has named a new Ombudsperson for Foster Youth, what issues do you hope Ms. Coonce will tackle first?
We believe there’s a step before tackling any issue. Foster Advocates’ hope is that she’ll pause and reach out to our foster community to identify what is most pressing.
Challenging the status quo, we think, is really important.
Also showing up with care, compassion, and empathy for the really hard things that will be reported. Foster Advocates has been fielding many of the concerns reported by fosters. We look forward to working alongside Misty and are grateful to have a seat at the table.
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Do you find that balance of empathy and challenging the status quo difficult to obtain, or does it come easier with time?
At this point in my career, I find the balance a lot easier. So it is with time and with a lot of practice, too. And that’s one thing with my staff, who are A-list professionals but maybe haven’t had a lot of the same experiences in the workplace, so I just offer my experience.
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What is the most respectful way for nonprofit advocacy organizations to work with people who have lived experience?
It’s allowing the person to define what that lived experience is. There isn’t a checkbox of the ways in which you are deemed suitable to be someone who has lived experience. It could look different for different people.
One thing that we really value at Foster Advocates is that we have the general philosophy of paying people for their time and their expertise. We highly value that as an organization. So anything that our fosters participate in, even if it’s benefiting them — and also obviously benefiting the organization — we pay them. We also make sure that if there’s any traveling or accommodations or anything like that, that that’s something that the organization covers.
Also being mindful of not re-traumatizing people with lived experience by having them only share all of the trauma and all of the pain. While that is important, we really try to focus on resilience and strengths and where people are today. We don’t want people like, “You’re not in enough trauma for us to decide that that has been lived experience.” No, you get to define what that is.
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I want to ask about the eight years you spent in foster care in Minnesota. Do you feel comfortable telling me a bit about how that came to be?
I had parents that ended up being incarcerated and that was what precipitated my sister and me going into foster care. The good thing is we were able to stay together, but we did move around quite a bit. We had a lot of different placements, which made socialization, friendships and schooling really difficult over those years.
Thankfully, we still had contact with both of our parents, so that bond was still there. I think that really helped the two of us as far as getting by through those really hard times — because we still had a connection to our parents and I know not everybody has that. But that definitely is a part of my story. Our story. My sister’s story.
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What are some of the main realizations you’ve had that could be instructive for others coming out of the foster care system?
It is OK to identify as a foster; understanding that that’s not your only identity, but it is OK to integrate it as a part of who you are. I didn’t do that. There was still a lot of stigma and I’m so glad that that isn’t the case anymore — that people can be really open about our foster identities. There can be something really empowering about that.
It’s also OK to ask for help, to form healthy relationships with safe adults. I had both of my parents as far as bonding, but I had a woman that was supportive of me just as an individual. She actually took me shopping before I went off to college, she rented a van and drove me and because I went to college out of state, drove me and my sister to that college and helped me move into the dorms — all of the things that my parents weren’t physically able to do, this person did. I would say for other fosters: Find that person, even if it’s just one — that person can make all the difference.
