Partnership and the Politics of Care: Advocates' Role in Passing and Implementing California's Law to Extend Foster Care

This report traces the history of the California's Fostering Connections to Success Act legislation from its introduction in the California State Assembly, through its passage and signing, and ultimately to its innovative and extensive implementation planning process. The report aims to document the California experience, highlighting its successes and challenges, so that other states may benefit, potentially smoothing the legislative and implementation processes there. Beyond telling the story of extended care, this report also focuses on two other issues. The first is the strong role played by a group of stakeholders (e.g., advocates, foundations, county administrators) in passing this bill and seeing it through implementation planning. We find that their central involvement was a result of their own desire to see the policy through to implementation, the limited capacity of state government agencies to implement such complex legislation, and the willingness of foundations to help fund implementation planning. The second is the degree to which research evidence was used in both the legislative and implementation planning phases. Our findings about use of evidence indicate that for research to be effective in shaping legislative decisions, it needs to be more timely and geared to policymakers' concerns. In particular, research on specific state-level contexts is greatly valued. For legislation that concerns sympathetic populations, testimonial or discursive evidence can be just as effective with legislators as research evidence. Moreover, in times of budgetary constraint, research evidence about cost effectiveness may be as important as research evidence about program or policy effectiveness

Memo from CalYOUTH: Early Findings on Extended Foster Care and Legal Permanency

This memo provides an early look at the relationship between extended foster care in California and the ways that older adolescents exit care in the state. Examining trends in exits from shortly before to immediately after the implementation of extended care, we find some evidence that, in the extended care era, fewer older adolescents are exiting care before their 18th birthday than before the law was implemented. However, rather than being the result of a reduction in exits to legal permanency, this shift has more to do with an increase in the likelihood that youth will remain in care rather than emancipate prior to age 18, run away from care, or experience other unwanted exits

Providing Foster Care for Young Adults: Early Implementation of California's Fostering Connections Act

This report examines the planning process for implementing California's Fostering Connections to Success Act, as well as the new law's early implementation. It is based on data collected from in-depth interviews with key informants who played a critical role in passage of the law, in implementation planning, or in early implementation at the county and state level and from focus groups with young people who stood to benefit directly from the legislation. Although extended foster care is likely to look different in different states, California's experience offers many lessons from which other states might learn

Becoming Adults: One-Year Impact Findings from the Youth Villages Transitional Living Evaluation

Young adults with histories of foster care or juvenile justice custody experience poor outcomes across a number of domains, on average, relative to their peers. While government funding for services targeting these groups of young people has increased in recent years, research on the effectiveness of such services is limited, and few of the programs that have been rigorously tested have been found to improve outcomes. The Youth Villages Transitional Living Evaluation is testing whether the Transitional Living program, operated by the social service organization Youth Villages, makes a difference in the lives of young people with histories of foster care or juvenile justice custody. The program, which was renamed "YVLifeSet" in April 2015, is intended to help these young people make a successful transition to adulthood by providing intensive, individualized, and clinically focused case management, support, and counseling

Extending Foster Care to Age 21: Weighing the Costs to Government against the Benefits to Youth

The Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 allows states to claim federal reimbursement for the costs of caring for and supervising Title IV-E eligible foster youth until their 21st birthday. This issue brief provides preliminary estimates of what the potential costs to government and the benefits to young people would be if states extend foster care to age 21. The analysis focuses on the increase in postsecondary educational attainment associated with allowing foster youth to remain in care until they are 21 years old and the resulting increase in lifetime earnings associated with postsecondary education. Researchers estimate that lifetime earnings would increase an average of two dollars for every dollar spent on keeping foster youth in care beyond age 18

California Youth Transitions to Adulthood Study (CalYOUTH): Early Findings from the Child Welfare Worker Survey

This report presents findings from the Child Welfare Worker Survey, an on-line survey of 235 California child welfare workers and their perceptions of key characteristics of the service delivery context of extended foster care, including: the availability of transitional living services; coordination between the child welfare system and other service systems such as county courts; and youth attitudes toward extended care. This report provides a valuable snapshot of how youths' caseworkers, central players in the implementation of extended foster care, perceive young people making the transition to adulthood out of care and the service context for that transition

Findings from the California Youth Transitions to Adulthood Study (CalYOUTH): Conditions of Foster Youth at Age 17

This report presents findings from the Baseline Youth Survey, providing the most comprehensive view to date of young people approaching the transition to adulthood from foster care in the wake of the federal Fostering Connections Act. Information gathered during interviews with 727 youths who were an average of 17 years old at the time, offers insight into the needs and aspirations of transition-age foster youth. Study findings can help inform efforts to improve policies and services for foster youths' transitioning to adulthood

Challenges and Opportunities Posed by the Reform Era.

In the midst of the era of welfare reform our nation is also going through a period of deep reform in child welfare services. A professor of social work from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty argues that these two reform movements need to be designed so that the two systems--workfare and child welfare--work collaboratively in a coordinated system. This paper was presented at the Reconciling Welfare Reform with Child Welfare" conference in February 1999 at the University of Minnesota.

Becoming Adults, Executive Summary: One-Year Impact Findings from the Youth Villages Transitional Living Evaluation

The Youth Villages Transitional Living Evaluation is testing whether the Transitional Living program, operated by the social service organization Youth Villages, makes a difference in the lives of young people with histories of foster care or juvenile justice custody. The program, which was renamed "YVLifeSet" in April 2015, is intended to help these young people make a successful transition to adulthood by providing intensive, individualized, and clinically focused case management, support, and counseling. The evaluation uses a rigorous random assignment design and is set in Tennessee, where Youth Villages operates its largest Transitional Living program. From October 2010 to October 2012, more than 1,300 young people were assigned, at random, to either a program group, which was offered the Transitional Living program's services, or to a control group, which was not offered those services. Using survey and administrative data, the evaluation team is measuring outcomes for both groups over time to assess whether Transitional Living services led to better outcomes for program group youth compared with the control group's outcomes

Emancipated foster youth and intimate partner violence: An exploration of risk and protective factors.

Due to their high rates of parental maltreatment and violence exposure, youth in the foster care system are considered particularly vulnerable to experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV) in adolescence and young adulthood. Those who have emancipated from foster care may be at a heightened risk, as they are significantly more likely to struggle in a variety of critical domains (i.e., mental health, substance use, and delinquency). This longitudinal study is the first to explore the impact of demographic, individual, family, and foster care system factors on IPV involvement for foster care alumni at age 23/24. Analyses were conducted on three waves of quantitative data from the Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth (the Midwest Study). We find that approximately 21% of the young adults in our sample were involved in some type of IPV at age 23/24, with bidirectional violence the most commonly reported form. Males were more likely than females to report IPV victimization, whereas females were more likely than males to report IPV perpetration and bidirectional violence. Young adults who reported parental IPV prior to foster care entry were more likely to be involved in bidirectionally violent partnerships than nonviolent partnerships in young adulthood, as were young adults who reported neglect by a foster caregiver and those who reported greater placement instability while in the foster care system. Anxiety at baseline increased the odds of IPV perpetration at age 23/24, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at baseline decreased the odds of IPV perpetration at age 23/24. Understanding the characteristics and experiences that place these young adults at risk for IPV will allow for more effective and targeted prevention efforts