Supports to improve outcomes for youth in foster care

• Tailor programs to developmental needs: Foster children’s needs change as they age. Offering programs targeted at specific age groups (e.g., a program on post-secondary opportunities for youth in late adolescence) increases their relevance and builds greater interest and buy-in from youth.
• Use active learning methods: When conducting classes for foster youth or parents, use active learning methods like classroom discussions and role playing. By requiring participants to apply their learning, they will often better remember the content and instructors can provide them with immediate feedback.
• Provide comprehensive services: Ensure foster youth and parents have access to comprehensive services to meet their physical, psychological, social, and other needs. Such services might include intensive case management, mental health counseling, mentoring, or behavioral interventions.
• Employ trauma-informed strategies: Foster youth and foster parents may have experienced multiple forms of adversity. Trauma-informed strategies aim to avoid triggering trauma symptoms or re-traumatizing an individual by making support services accessible and appropriate for those who have experienced trauma.
• Identify a champion: Providing direct supports to foster youth and their families often requires significant resources. Identify a leader in a public child welfare agency who can devote resources and ongoing attention to the implementation of the intervention.

Before making investments in this strategy, city and county leaders should ensure this strategy addresses local needs.

The Urban Institute and Mathematica have developed indicator frameworks to help local leaders assess conditions related to upward mobility, identify barriers, and guide investments to address these challenges. These indicator frameworks can serve as a starting point for self-assessment, not as a comprehensive evaluation, and should be complemented by other forms of local knowledge.

The Urban Institute's Upward Mobility Framework identifies a set of key local conditions that shape communities’ ability to advance upward mobility and racial equity. Local leaders can use the Upward Mobility Framework to better understand the factors that improve upward mobility and prioritize areas of focus. Data reports for cities and counties can be created here.

Several indicators in the Upward Mobility Framework may be improved with investments in supports to improve outcomes for youth in foster care. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in these interventions could help, examine the following:

• Access to health services: Ratio of residents to primary care physicians. These data are available from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Area Health Resource File.
• Housing stability: Number and share of public-school children who are ever homeless during the school year. These data are collected by local public school districts.
• Safety from trauma: Number of deaths due to injury per 100,000 people. These data are available from the National Center for Health Statistics’ Mortality File and the CDC’s WONDER database. 

Mathematica's Education-to-Workforce (E-W) Indicator Framework helps local leaders identify the data that matter most in helping students and young adults succeed. Local leaders can use the E-W framework to better understand education and workforce conditions in their communities and to identify strategies that can improve outcomes in these areas.

One indicator in the E-W Framework may be improved with investments in this strategy. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in this strategy could help, examine the following:

• Childhood experiences: Percentage of individuals with fewer than three adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).
• Access to health, mental health, and social supports: Percentage of programs offering health, mental health, and social services, or staff or consultants providing infant and early childhood mental health consultation (IECMHC) services.