The Crisis

Learn more about the foster care crisis
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What's Happening?

Over 5,000 children are currently in foster care in Virginia with hundreds more potential kids with active child welfare cases. More teenagers are entering care with higher needs than ever before which presents greater challenges for foster parents. An estimated 68,000 children are living in kinship arrangements (relatives) which have the potential to move into foster care.

Our child welfare system is not equipped to handle the needs of all of these children and families without the support of local communities.

Foster and kinship parents are struggling and 50% of foster parents quit after the first year because the challenges are often overwhelming.

Working together, faith, business, nonprofit and creative leaders can improve the outcomes for these kids by providing what the government can’t — belonging, support, and connection.

Not everyone should consider becoming a foster, adoptive or kinship parent, but EVERYONE can help change the outcome for a child in care. It will take all of us in ways big and small. The first step is understanding the crisis we face in Virginia.

The Need is Real

This crisis is solvable and everyone can do something

Foster Care

Families In need

Kinship Care

Reunification

Adoption

Former Foster Youth

Foster Care

  • Crisis: Foster families are not available or given the training and resources to meet the needs of the over 5,000 kids in foster care in need of trauma-informed families to help with increasing behavioral, educational, and physical needs.
  • Action:  Recruit and train more therapeutic foster families and create connected communities of faith, business, healthcare and government to wrap around families and kids to help meet the increasing needs.
  • Tipping Point: Resources are tied to specific diagnosis and help evaporates when a child gets better. The resources are then reallocated instead of providing continuing care to maintain child's health and continue improvement.
Learn More: Advocate for Families

Families in Need

  •  Crisis: The expanding financial and opioid crises as well as changing governmental support are putting more families with children at-risk of entering the foster care system due to the lack of resources, addictions, incarcerations, or neglect and abuse.
  • Action: Proactively connecting families with available resources before removal is required to protect the children's safety and stability.
  • Tipping Point: Families need advocates to help them navigate complex processes even when resources may be available. The best way to change the outcomes for kids in foster care is for them to never face the trauma of removal from home in the first place.
Learn More: Building Connected Communities

Kinship Care

  • Crisis: To avoid foster care children are being rerouted to family members or close fictive kin without providing enough resources to support the child's on-going needs. Studies show over 68,000 in Virginia fall into this category. Without resources this puts multiple strains on kin parents and often results in the child being removed a second time into foster care.
  • Action: Connecting kinship parents to training, available resources and wrap around care to ensure longevity of a placement.
  • Tipping Point: Most kinship parents have informal custody of the child outside of the child welfare system which makes it difficult to provide support.
Learn More: Kinship

Reunification

  • Crisis: Birth families often work extremely hard to regain custody of their children but too often these children are back in the foster system again because the birth family lacks the on-going support to maintain the environment they were able to create. Approximately 1/3 of kids in foster care are reunified each year but more than 15% of kids in care have been removed from their homes more than once.
  • Action: Connecting families with available legal, financial and educational resources to stabilize the birth family more quickly.
  • Tipping Point: Kids who have been separated from their first family and reunified often need just as much behavioral and physical support as they did when they were in care but these resources are not always available to the birth families.
Learn More: Support Birth Families

Adoption

  • Crisis: Adoption from foster care is not the end of a journey but the beginning of the next journey. Over 1,500 kids in foster care have the goal of adoption by a foster family before they turn 18 and leave the system. While adoptions should be permanent solutions built on love and support, many adoptions from foster care disrupt, hurting all parties because of the impacts of trauma and other effects of foster care.
  • Action: Connect adoptive families to needed support and wrap around care while supporting additional resources to help older youth choose adoption over aging out.
  • Tipping Point: Older youth receive greater benefits including educational and housing financial support by choosing not to be adopted and aging out of care with no familial support.
Learn More: Considering Adoption from Foster Care

Former Foster Youth

  • Crisis: Over 500 youth leave the foster care system each year with little to no family or support structure. The outcomes for these kids that do not have any support structure are dire and include homelessness, food insecurity, difficulty finding meaningful employment, incomplete education and much higher rates of depression and suicide.
  • Action: Build awareness and community support for this youth to increase their opportunities to thrive.
  • Tipping Point: Independent Living programs provide a training ground for youth to learn more about caring for themselves however, often the realities of life are still overwhelming and the effects of foster care have been delayed but not removed.
Learn More: Fostering Futures Program