Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/foster-care/)
Over the past two decades, I have had the extraordinary experience of working with youth involved in the juvenile justice system and the child welfare system. I am thrilled to bear witness as Los Angeles County finally moves toward using diversion programs to keep kids out of juvenile justice and in school and at home where they belong.
At the age of 16, A.S. had just made his high school football team when his life was upended. His mother was moving overseas, and he would have to go live with his remarried father and four step-siblings in another part of town.
Christina Young remembers the day the cops came for her at school.
She was fifteen years old — a sophomore at Murry Bergtraum High School for Business in lower Manhattan. She and four of her friends were sitting together at a table in the school’s large and chaotic cafeteria.
Relly Brown was so destitute in 2016 they could not even get a room in the abandoned house on the corner of Fountain Avenue and Cherokee Avenue in Los Angeles. They had to settle for the porch.
By the age of 17, David Vanwetter had been in and out of detention perhaps a dozen times.
Washington state is vowing to keep young people like Vanwetter — often with complicated and troubled lives — from becoming homeless after they exit the jailhouse door. The state Legislature has ambitiously pledged to stop releasing youth from “publicly funded systems of care” — juvenile detention, foster care and mental health and drug treatment — into homelessness by the end of 2020. And that doesn’t mean putting them in a cab to a homeless shelter: Youth must have “safe and stable housing,” the law says.
The fight against youth homelessness drags on and on. It is not that the fighters are no match for a seemingly intractable issue that has haunted the nation for decades.
When Patrick McCarthy first had lunch with Lisa Hamilton more than a decade ago, he remembers thinking, “She really sounds like a Casey person.”
The commissioner of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS)
has won the 2019 Excellence for Children Leadership Award by Casey Family Programs.
As the holiday season rolls around and many of us are cherishing time with those we love, families separated by incarceration continue to face barriers when trying to maintain a sense of support and connection with their loved ones.
When I took my first breath in this world, it was while being placed into the arms of a child herself. A drug-addicted and alcoholic mother at the age of just 16 and, needless to say, my mother was a very reckless, sad, incapable parent.