May is Foster Care Awareness Month
May is Foster Care Awareness Month. This is a time when we should be able to look up from our work and celebrate the recognition from our community and government of the unique needs of Fosters and the importance of the foster care community in Minnesota.
But it is a hard month to feel that recognition. It was only in 2019 that Minnesota recognized this month by proclamation for the first time. And over the past year, we’ve been fighting every day for recognition of the real harms caused by the pandemic. With the known challenges Fosters already face in achieving housing, education, and employment stability, we had hoped that Fosters would be a key focus of the greater pandemic response. Instead, at this time last year, we were told that “COVID wasn’t impacting Fosters.” If not for the work of our Coalition of Foster and Family Advocates (CFFA), our community would have once again been left out of public recognition and the state response.
However, the challenge of being unseen is not unique to this month, or to the COVID response. It’s a larger issue that starts within the child welfare system, where many avoid the fact that even when family separation is necessary, it is traumatic. For too many in crisis, the cure is almost indistinguishable from the poison.
I imagine a world without the need for foster care. Our community needs a large-scale change and a narrative shift that imagines beyond the crisis that brings families in contact with the system. Imagine that a family is represented as a person with a broken arm. Would your first response be to cut the arm off? No. When someone is hurt we seek healing. We make a cast to reinforce the broken bone, give medicine, we would give them time and resources to heal. We would only consider amputation or separation if all other measures failed. Right now, the child welfare system’s primary tool is also its most drastic. We separate families. It’s a wound that will never heal. So why do we do it so often? If children matter, then their families must matter. If we believe that it takes a village to raise a child, then it also takes a village to fail one.
The first step is to build a better village. The system is oriented on the helpers, not those we are helping. We need to ensure that as few kids as possible enter the system by investing in families’ healing and, in the rare cases where kids must enter foster care, we need to make sure they can come out whole. We need Fosters to be able to dream of a better future. One in which we can hope for more than survival. We need to acknowledge that we can never rectify the harms of separation, but we must ensure young people a better future.
To achieve this shift in imagination and narrative, we must listen to Fosters. We carry the scars of the system and know it best. I created Foster Advocates so I wasn’t the only one pushing for systems change. At Foster Advocates, we know there are leaders with lived experience ready to step up, and we work every day to honor their voices, power, and purpose. Today, we ask that you pause and offer that recognition as well.
In Solidarity,
Hoang Murphy
Executive Director
What to Celebrate During Foster Care Awareness Month
Despite living through and engaging in advocacy around deep challenges, Fosters show deep reflection, creativity, and optimism. They deserve spaces for their lived experience and expertise to be honored and their leadership to envision new possibilities for the child welfare system. Please celebrate Foster Care Awareness Month by matching Fosters’ passion, resilience, and hope, by joining us in advocating for better outcomes and elevating the voices of impacted youth.
Through the work of CFFA, Hennepin County was one of only TWO entities in the country that provided direct cash transfers to Fosters using CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act dollars. We are continuing to build partnerships out of this work and actively aligning with the state and counties to prioritize ARP (American Rescue Plan) funds.
Our first Fellowship is approaching the final two months of the program! We look forward to celebrating the first cohort graduation in August, and to share the op-eds Fellows have been writing which will be published in The Imprint.
Foster leaders have shared their passion and purpose in so many ways this spring, through testimony, leading research (college experience data to be released soon!), and by providing visionary direction for our organization’s priorities and program expansion. We look forward to sharing more details about a new program in June!
Fosters Respond to Derek Chauvin Trial
In April, four of our Foster leaders wrote reactions the week of the trial verdict. Read these raw and powerful words from Deddtrease, Dezarae, Jamari, and Juwan.
