Ohio foster care youth and alumni are grateful to have two federal Senators who care about improving college access, retention, and completion rates for foster and homeless youth.
This bill amends the Higher Education Act to simplify eligibility for federal financial aid and to improve outreach, resources, and policies for homeless and foster youth, by doing the following:
• Ensuring that college access programs identify, recruit, and prepare homeless and foster students for college, as well as collecting data in order to identify ways they can further support student retention and success
• Streamlining the process of applying for and receiving financial aid for foster and homeless youth, including retaining paperwork and not requiring the young person to re-determine their status, year after year
• Retaining important documentation-- paperwork often gets lost for homeless and foster youth, and can jeopardize our access to financial aid and other critical supports
• Requiring states to provide in-state tuition rates for foster and homeless youth, in order to reduce barriers to college attendance due to lack of financial support
• Developing a plan to assist homeless and foster youth in accessing campus housing resources during and between academic terms
• Communicating the resources and financial aid available to homeless and foster youth
• Designating liaisons to assist homeless and foster youth in accessing institutional and community services and to support their ability to complete higher education
2.) The Fostering Success in Higher Education Act (S. 1650) is supported by Ohio’s very own Senator Sherrod Brown, and is scheduled to be reintroduced in the Senate and House early next week!!
This bill seeks to update the Higher Education Act by providing grants to states throughout the nation to increase the number of foster and homeless youth that apply for and enroll in institutions of higher education. States that receive grants must use at least 70% of the grant funds to award sub-grants to colleges/universities to support and require them to become institutions of excellence by improving college access, retention, and completion rates for foster and homeless youth.
This bill would:
• Establish or expand transitions between K-12 and higher education for foster and homeless youth, including summer bridge programs, through statewide initiatives.
• Develop “institutions of excellence” that are committed to serving foster and homeless youth from entrance to completion via robust support services and by covering the remaining cost of attendance beyond federal and state grants.
Ohio foster care advocates, if the Fostering Success in Higher Education Act becomes federal law, it could:
1.) Help support existing #excellentinstitutions, including: Columbus State Community College, University of Cincinnati, Cuyahoga Community College, Wright State University, and Ohio University.
2.) Provide opportunities to support sustainability and expansion of awesome programs, including: Scholar Network, HEMI, Sullivan-Deckard Scholars Opportunity Program, Reach Scholars Mentoring Program, and the Independent Scholars Network.
3.) Lead to the creation and development of more #excellentinstitutions throughout each state in the nation, to support improved higher education outcomes for foster and homeless youth.
HUD Secretary Ben Carson (center) met with a coalition of advocates and former foster youths about a new plan for public housing support after foster care. Photo courtesy of iFoster.
Jamole Callahan is turning 40 this year. He’s carved out a successful career in advocacy and motivational speaking (his Twitter handle is @MrMotivator). But in college, as a youth who had aged out of foster care, his path was far from stable.
My issue after aging out was there was just nowhere for me to go when school went on break,” Callahan said in an interview with The Chronicle of Social Change.
During those college breaks in Ohio, he stayed with classmates, or sometimes with a friend of his high school science teacher. But many teens lack such options.
“We see kids attempt postsecondary and fail just because they don’t have housing,” Callahan said. “They have to work to maintain an apartment, then school becomes the background. And it becomes all about survival.”
There are some competing ideas about how best to legislate new federal support for housing to help youth after they exit foster care. But a group of housing advocates and former foster youths recently met with top federal housing officials to make the case that there’s no need to wait for Congress.
A group called the Fostering Stable Housing Opportunities (FSHO) Coalition — which includes Callahan’s youth-led ACTION Ohio and the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare — met in early March with Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson to lay out a plan for a $20 million voucher program aimed at preventing homelessness for transition age foster youth. Under that plan, HUD would use an existing pot of money to provide on-demand vouchers and assistance for foster youth who needed stable housing.”
HUD is currently reviewing the proposal to determine the agency’s authority to act on it. If the plan moves forward, it could be a game changer for thousands of teens and young adults who age out of foster care each year.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. After decades of reforms aimed at preventing youth from becoming adults in foster care, or ending up on the street when it happens, the number of youth who age out of the system has stubbornly ranged from 20,000 to 25,000 per year.
And research shows that the percentage of foster youth who end up experiencing homelessness is still outrageously high — 28 percent experience homelessness by age 21, according to the National Youth in Transition Database. In some states, it’s above 40 percent.
“They are doing something that could mean a seismic shift in housing and child welfare policy,” said Ruth Anne White, executive director of the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare.
Following is a breakdown of how the plan would work.
The Programs
Through its Tenant Protection Fund, HUD is given money to provide Tenant Protection Vouchers. In general, these vouchers are designed to provide rent support to people when changing circumstances threaten to leave them homeless. Surely, one such circumstance would be a person aging out of foster care at age 18 or older, with no affordable housing option on the horizon.
There are several different types of Tenant Protection Vouchers that target different populations. One is called the Family Unification Program (FUP) voucher, which can be used for two child welfare-related groups:
Families for whom a lack of housing portends a foster care removal or problems reunifying with a child in foster care.
Youth between the ages of 18 and 21 who lack adequate housing as they age out of foster care.
Alongside the FUP voucher is the Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) program, which provides assistance aimed at helping public housing residents increase their earned income and decrease reliance on the social safety net. This support includes job training, child care, transportation subsidies and financial literacy classes.
The FUP voucher lasts for three years. But continued FSS participation allows a FUP voucher recipient to receive an additional two years of support, so pairing the two could mean post-foster care housing support can last for up to five years.
Under the plan pitched to HUD by the advocates, a child welfare agency would file FUP paperwork in the year leading up a youth’s emancipation from foster care – whether that occurred at age 18, 21 or some point in between. HUD would issue the FUP voucher, and the local public housing authority would administer both the voucher and the FSS services.
It is worth noting here that currently, most public housing authorities do not offer FUP vouchers. More on that later, because the coalition’s plan would negate that barrier.
The Money
So that’s the structure that can be used to support youths aging out of foster care. But is there money available to fund the vouchers and the employment-related services? Apparently yes — the advocates who met with Carson argue that there’s a fund at HUD that can be tapped to jumpstart this.
FUP has had an up-and-down ride when it comes to funding, White said. It has been an allowable version of the Tenant Protection Vouchers since 1990, and there was a regular carve-out for it until about 2002, after which it faded out of the annual appropriations process.
A line item for FUP resurfaced in fiscal 2008, written into appropriations that year by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and former Sen. Kit Bond (R-Kansas). The two wrote in instructions for HUD to spend $20 million on FUP. More recent allocations for FUP have ranged from $10 million in 2017 to $20 million in 2018.
But the coalition told HUD officials that there is a bigger bank of unspent HUD funds that could be used to create a dedicated FUP youth program. The congressional justifications for President Trump’s 2019 budget noted $133.2 million in carryover funds in the area of “rental assistance.”
Nearly all of that money is from the Tenant Protection Fund, where FUP lives. It is held in reserve at the moment for housing complexes affected by demolition or expiring affordable housing contracts, and to help situate some people in the federal witness protection program. The FSHO Coalition asked for $20 million out of this contingency fund to be dedicated for FUP youth.
The Renewal
The most critical piece of the advocates’ plan is a change in the way that FUP vouchers are made available to youth.
Currently, FUP’s youth vouchers are awarded in blocks through a competitive process where public housing agencies are the applicants. This, White said, is an inefficient way to get at a finite group of youth who are flung throughout the country. There are thousands of housing authorities, and only the winners would receive vouchers.
In a place where the demand by foster youths is low, or a housing agency is bad at connecting with child welfare agencies, those vouchers might sit idle. And elsewhere, foster youths who might badly need the help wouldn’t get vouchers because they were awarded to the nearby agency.
Other HUD voucher programs are processed on-demand, meaning that a single family or person applies and is considered for an available slot. This centralizes the approval process to HUD, removing the local housing authorities and their individual store of vouchers from the equation.
“Converting to an on-demand process is key,” White said, “because youth continue to be in purgatory for pilot projects. We appreciate all the efforts to build housing around the country for youth – but 40 new units in Cincinnati won’t help the youth in Athens. This complements those efforts.”
The result is that most areas of the country end up with no FUP vouchers, and among the public housing authorities that do offer them, most of the action goes to families, and not foster youth. A 2014 study found that just 91 of the 195 FUP programs served foster youth, and among those 91 programs, only a third of the FUP vouchers went to foster youths.
“The most common reason [public housing authorities] cited for not serving any youth was a lack of referrals,” said the study. “The lack of youth referrals likely did not arise from lack of demand.”
Converting FUP’s foster youth vouchers to an on-demand process would solve that, and allow child welfare agencies to deal directly with HUD in preparing for these teens to age out of foster care and into stable housing for up to five years. And when a particular youth had completed the FUP-FSS program, that voucher would recycle back to HUD to be used for the next youth.
What Comes Next
The FSHO Coalition sat down with HUD Secretary Carson on March 4 to lay out what they believed to be an actionable plan that the agency could start setting up without any help from Congress.
Carson was engaged in his meeting on the plan, said Callahan of ACTION Ohio. “He gets it, he does. He was very intrigued about the info we had, and had questions about where the data came from.”
That was hardly the first or last meeting with HUD the coalition has had. Callahan said they have been lobbying HUD and Congress for seven years, and have developed allies there. Danielle Bastarache, HUD’s deputy assistant secretary for policy programs, has “become a champion for this,” Callahan said.
White, of the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare, said that HUD officials have been supportive of the plan. The agency sent officials with her to a meeting this month at the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that oversees child welfare policy and funding.
“So they hoofed it over when we had the strategy meeting about it,” White said. “I feel like they wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t want to move forward.”
HUD officials declined to comment for this story, but a spokesman for the agency said the proposal is being reviewed by its Office of General Counsel and Chief Financial Officer.
There is also the matter of legislation to permanently embed this plan into law. The coalition that met with HUD had originally conceived of this plan in a 2018 bill – called the Fostering Stable Housing Opportunities (FSHO) Act, which would guarantee a housing voucher starting from emancipation through age 25 for any youth aging out of foster care who could demonstrate the need for a subsidy.
The bill — sponsored in the House by Reps. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) and Karen Bass (D-Calif.), and in the Senate by several members of the Senate Caucus on Foster Youth — ran up against some opposition in the previous Congress because it included a work requirement. That requirement has since been removed, and White said that the group has also garnered the support of House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.).
If HUD moves forward on its own authority, passing the FSHO Act mostly becomes an exercise in codifying this plan. It would establish the foster youth voucher as a distinct program within FUP that is to be carried out using an on-demand process.
“If Carson signed a memorandum today, that could go out today,” said Callahan. “But at the turn of a new administration, that could go away.”
An online petition circulated to support the FSHO bill has more than 54,000 signatures.
If it all comes together, the plan could ensure a key stabilizing factor for one of the most likely groups in the nation to end up on the streets.
“The child welfare system knows when a kid will be terminated,” Callahan said. “Now we can make sure there’s a voucher anywhere in the country for them to provide assistance.”
Reunification is a term that refers to the process of when a child or teen is sent back to live with their biological family after spending time in foster care. What happens to children and teens who experience foster care, and are sent back home?
What resources exist to help them succeed?
Top Five Local Resources for Reunified Youth:
*Hopefully, some of these resources might exist in other Ohio counties as well.
Franklin County Children’s Services has an Asset Building program for youth ages 14-17 years old who are reunified with their biological families. The young person needs to call the FCCS Intake Line at (614) 229-7000, and ask specifically for the “Asset Building Program.”
Buckeye Ranch has a Same Day Assessment program for counseling. In the assessment they will talk with the young adult about what services would best support them, including in-home, or community based outreach. Teens can consent to their own treatment on a time-limited basis.
Achieve More and Prosper (AMP) is a free program for youth, ages 14 – 24 years old, who need help with financial issues, limited job options, low wages, unreliable transportation, and lack of support with a personal advocate and a range of services. Here’s a link to their online application.
Huckleberry House provides a 24-hour Crisis Shelter for teens ages 12-17 who are homeless, who have run away and/or who are dealing with a crisis at home. Youth can go to a designated Safe Place site for immediate assistance and support. Safe Places include: Kroger, White Castle, the Fire Station, every Columbus Metropolitan Library branch and Worthington Public Library locations.
The Franklin County Youth Advisory Board is a great local resource for peer support and advocacy opportunities. Link to sign up and get involved.
It never hurts to reach out the young person’s school as well. Some schools provide bus passes and other academic support resources.
Ohio has a fractured safety net for transitional youth in general, and this is especially true for young people "aging out" of foster care.
1.) Ohio ranks dead last in the nation when it comes to state funding for child-protection services.
2.) Our child welfare services are county-administered, with 88 different children services agencies with varying levels of taxpayer support.
3.) It is important for young people with a foster care history to know about about available resources, and to have the skills to navigate (often complex or disjointed) systems to access them.
Yesterday (her son) disobeyed, and he was put in a time-out and lost his screen time:
He took this piece of paper and he drew a very small circle and he said, "This is how much I love you." Then, he took another piece of paper, and drew large circles to represent all the other people he “loved more” than me. I picked up the first piece of paper, with the tiny circle, and said, “I understand you are upset with me because of what’s happening but this is how much I love you even though I’m upset with what you did.” I drew a very large circle covering the whole page. His eyes widened, his tight shoulders released, and his face relaxed into a smile. He took a moment, and then drew an equally large circle and said, "This is how much I really love you - and I’m sorry I didn’t do what you asked - and I’m sorry I ate the cookies”. I realize that even though he misbehaved, he inherently felt shame and he reacted in anger towards me instead of accepting what he had done. When I responded with reassurance that I still cared about him, he felt safe again and took responsibility and moved forward. Just thought I would share this moment, because when I drew my circle I didn’t expect the response from him that he gave, I just wanted him to know that his mistakes in childhood would never change my love, for him and that every one of us needs to accept what we do and take responsibility -- but that’s so much easier when you know you are supported and loved.
The Fostering Stable Housing Opportunities Acthas passed United States House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee. The next step is consideration on the Floor of the House. In the meantime, a partner bill (that mirrors this one) is also going through the United States Senate.
During the month of September, we are reaching out to foster care youth, alumni and allies throughout the nation, and asking them to reach out to their local district office about this issue.
You can call and make an appointment, and say something like this:
“Hi, my name is __________ and I am a constituent of your district. I am calling to schedule a meeting with your office regarding important issues related to housing and child welfare. Is Congressman/Senator [NAME] available to meet with me on [DATE]? If not, could you let me know some dates that he/she or a staff person might be available to meet? Thank you so much for your time.”
3.) How can I prepare for the meeting?
You will want to read over, and be familiar with these Talking Points. (And please keep us posted in advance of your scheduled visits, in case we can be of support).
If you want to know more, it might help to look at:
4.) What information should I bring to the meeting?
You can print a copy of the Talking Points and the Turner bill summary, and give them to the legislator and/or their staffer.
5.) How can I follow up after the meeting?
You will want to keep a copy of their business card, and write a thank you letter afterwards.
Please keep us posted, and know that we are here to support. I’m a former foster youth myself, who experienced homelessness within a year of “aging out” of foster care. But I aged out in 1989 – so why are our brothers and sisters of the system still struggling with this (predictable and fixable) issue?
We can and we must end the Foster Care to Homeless Pipeline – together.
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Adoption Network Cleveland recently created “Reconnections Support” to support
former foster youth who are trying to reconnect with members of their
biological families…Through
one-on-one and peer support, this program focuses on helping young people
navigate those relationships, set realistic expectations, and maintain healthy
boundaries.
As foster care youth and alumni, this challenge of how to reconnect with biological
family members after foster care can be complex for each of us:
- Some of us are contacted by family members who try to take advantage of us
financially.
- Some of us seek out and are
finally able to connect with our long-lost sibling - but the process of
rebuilding that relationship can take time.
- Some of us reach out to family members and experience rejection.
- Some of us try to talk with parents about previous abuse or neglect, and the
parent denies it ever happened.
From the time when I first “aged out” of foster care to my volunteer work ever
since, I have both witnessed and experienced these complications. Trying to
reconnect is complicated, and I am deeply grateful that Adoption Network
Cleveland has created this statewide resource to help.
The 18th wedding anniversary is the "cook your wife steak with a blowtorch" year -- or at least that's what the hubby tells me. The steak was delicious!
Youth who age out of foster care face many challenges during our transition to young adulthood – but our greatest challenges are related to housing. When you don’t know where you are going to sleep tonight, this makes it harder to succeed when it comes higher education and employment.
The idea behind it was that change would take place in the following order:
1.) End chronic homelessness by 2015
2.) End Veterans homelessness by 2015
3.) End homelessness among families, children and youth by 2020
4.) Set a path to ending all types of homelessness by 2020
It's strange that, from the very beginning, the mission of ending youth homelessness was ranked so low a priority on the timeline. Why and how could ending chronic homelessness precede ending homelessness for youth?.
If you look at homelessness as an overflowing bathtub – why not try to turn off the faucet first? Our young people are Ready to Launch into adulthood. If we don't help them now, they are likely to become chronically homeless later.
Obviously, 2015 has passed, and chronic homelessness has not been alleviated.
They have since separated out:
Ending homelessness for unaccompanied youth under 25
Ending homelessness among families with children
So, what's their plan to end homelessness for unaccompanied youth under 25 by 2020?
It's a data strategy, rather than an action strategy. Their plan is highly based on point-in-time counts, numbers and data -- which, when it comes to youth aging out of foster care, they already have.
Likewise when it comes to transitional youth, they also have the data.
If the below diagram was their preliminary vision back in 2010, then how has it evolved since then? And how involved have homeless youth and young adults been in shaping that plan?
Sweet surprise at my foster parent training on Friday - from a young person in foster care that I met and gave books to back in 2006. He still has the books.
It's been a weird week, with car problems and what not. Then, I go to work and discover that I've been chosen for second part of the Thousand People of Genoa project.
The intention was to capture 1,000 portraits of the people in Columbus, which will all be exhibited in Genoa next year. Photographer Timothy Costa said he wanted to celebrate “the warmth and kindness of the people of Columbus.”
So, that was pretty sweet of him.
United States House of Representatives House Committee on Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance
Proponent testimony on: The Amended Version of H.R. 2069, the Fostering Stable Housing Opportunities Act
Chairman Duffy, Vice Chairman Ross, Ranking Member Cleaver, and members of the committee,
Thank you for this opportunity to offer testimony on the amended version of H.R. 2069, the Fostering Stable Housing Opportunities Act.
My name is Lisa Dickson. As a former foster youth, I wish that I could be there in person to share how much this matters, and the potential this bill has to improve outcomes after foster care. More importantly, I wish you could hear directly from the young people themselves, in and from foster care, who have worked for six years to make this bill a reality.
I am contacting you on behalf of two volunteer organizations. The OHIO Youth Advisory Board serves as the statewide voice of foster care youth, ages 14 and older. ACTION Ohio is an alumni group of adults who experienced foster care personally, and who dedicate our time to improve outcomes for the next generation. Our two groups have been working together since 2006 to make a difference, side-by-side.
Young people enter foster care due to factors outside of their control, such as experiencing neglect, abuse or disconnection from a parent to due to death, incarceration or substance abuse challenges. As foster youth, we do not choose the family that we are born into - we can only make our own choices. In the midst of family upheaval, all we can do is seek to survive the moment at hand, and figure out how to build our future. We often feel alone in this struggle - especially when throughout the nation, over 20,000 youth “age out” of the system every year, and strive to build successful lives.
Leaving home and moving out on your own as a young adult is a milestone that many young people look forward to. But for young people in foster care, this experience often catapults them into an immediate struggle for survival. We want to attain self-sufficiency, and the most important and pressing question is: “Where am I going to live?” Having a stable residence is critical when it comes to pursuing employment and higher education.
Imagine being a teen in foster care who is getting ready to enter into young adulthood. You have no savings account, and no parental co-signer to move into an apartment. You worked really hard to get into college, but the dorms are closed on holiday breaks - so, the irony is that while everyone else is celebrating with their family, you don’t know where you are going to sleep that night.
I don’t have to imagine that, because I was one of those young people. When I aged out of foster care in 1989, there was no plan for my future. I had to figure out that path on my own. Thanks to support from an Admissions Counselor at the University of Kentucky named Randy Mills, I entered college at 16 years old. But I ended up homeless within a year. I continued to pursue college, even as I struggled to find an affordable place to live. I found a home in a Methodist dorm called the Wesley Foundation. With stable housing, I was able to complete college and graduate school, working up to five part-time jobs at a time. Since then, I’ve been working as a full-time librarian for 19 years. It’s my honor to work hard, pay taxes, and seek to “pay it forward” for the next generation.
But that was back in 1989 – so why is the Foster Care to Homeless Pipeline still so prevalent today? Our nation has moved forward in so many other areas since the time when I was in foster care. The 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act set a time limit for how long children should languish in foster care limbo before seeking to terminate parental rights. The 1999 Foster Care Independence Act established Chafee funding and independent living classes. The 2008 Fostering Connections Act provided states with the option to extend foster care supports until age 21.
And yet, housing remains the biggest missing piece after foster care. Research demonstrates the pervasiveness of this struggle. Chapin Hall’s longitudinal Midwest research study reveals that 36% of former foster youth experience homelessness before turning 26 years old. In a recent national survey conducted by Child Trends, states were asked to report the primary area in which they could do better to support young people transitioning from foster care. Not surprisingly, housing was the area most commonly marked as in need of improvement.
We have the numbers, and we have the data - what our nation needs is a sense of urgency about this problem. While children are in foster care, the Children’s Bureau measures each states’ success in caring for them by three categories: Safety, Permanence and Well-Being. But if we care about the safety of our children, it should matter to us that when they “age out” into homelessness, they are at risk of trafficking and many other negative outcomes. If we care about permanence, we need to recognize that there is nothing more impermanent than not having a stable address. If we care about well being, then we need to acknowledge the dreams, talents and aspirations of our youth – and that helping them successfully launch into adulthood benefits not only them personally, but also our nation. Given the chance to contribute to society, please know that we can and will give back.
The Fostering Stable Housing Opportunities Act is thoughtful and intentional. It is based on the premise that we already know where teens in foster care are placed, and that we can connect them with existing housing supports by putting them on the list early. This bill is youth-driven in every sense — because the very reason it exists is that a volunteer group of Ohio foster youth and alumni have been fundraising locally and then traveling to D.C. to advocate for the past six years about the national gap that exists between foster care and housing.
We are not lobbyists or paid staff members. We are current and former foster youth ourselves - and this is an issue that deeply matters to us. We demonstrate how much we care by volunteering our time to help others. Even as we travel to D.C. annually to advocate for this need, on a volunteer basis, we each continue to pursue work, college and opportunities to give back to the community - because that’s what matters most to each of us. Our goal is to work hard, move forward and care for the next generation.
I urge you to pass this bill. The price tag is literally nothing. This is no-cost opportunity to improve outcomes for my brothers and sisters in and from foster care.
Thank you for your time. Please know that I am and will remain available for any questions.
