This Is How You End the Foster Care to Prison Pipeline

The Right Path program aims to help break the cycle of poverty and criminality. It covers tuition and course materials for students as well as providing stipends.

For social service agencies, prioritizing well-being requires new procedures and a framework for understanding holistic wellness. The Full Frame Initiative has partnered with agencies in the states of Massachusetts and Missouri in an effort to bring categories of well-being into their purview. The Initiative uses five metrics—safety, mastery, social connectedness, and access to resources— to help align social systems, ranging from courts and juvenile corrections to homeless housing services, with social needs so that agencies can better assist their communities.

Cece Yara Child Advocacy Centre Foundation provides comprehensive care, protection and legal assistance to youth who suffered sexual abuse or are at risk. So far, they’ve helped reach eight convictions and have about 57 ongoing cases. The Foundation also emphasizes the importance of psychotherapy and education, empowering youth to learn about personal safety, boundaries and age-appropriate sex education in an effort to prevent reoccurring abuse.

To help fill the gap for some 200 Detroit students who rely on school lunches, local artists and nonprofits are teaming up to distribute meals and provide creative inspiration. Library Street Collective, an art gallery in downtown Detroit, provides the students with sketchbooks developed by artists. Meanwhile, Standby, an acclaimed restaurant, prepares the meals. Partners from other Detroit organizations step in to help with additional logistics.

Several programs have cropped up throughout California to help former foster youth navigate what has been identified as the biggest challenge of aging out of the foster case system -- housing. NextUp and other initiatives at community colleges provide counseling and financial support to students who lack a built-in support network.

In 2017, California's Continuum of Care (CCR) program began shifting money away from group homes for children in foster care, closing 300 homes in the first year. The money goes instead to recruiting more families to house children, who are newly eligible for extended care to age 25. The goal is to shrink a system that too often dooms children to homelessness on the streets and incarceration. While some clients have found the family love that a group home can't replicate, many lower-income families have struggled to meet the program's requirements, threatening its ultimate success.

A couple created a nonprofit in Philadelphia to make micro grants for those who need small amounts to pay off medical bills or legal fees so they can move on with their lives. The effort garnered modest donations, including through their own wedding registry, and has made about 10 grants, but those have had significant impacts on recipients. The two acknowledge this is more like a bandaid, so they also partnered with a policy organization to work on wider systemic change.

TreeHouse, a nonprofit in Washington state, achieved an 89 percent five year graduate rate for the hundreds of high school students in the foster care system it serves. This figure is a stark contrast to a 2010 statistic that found only 36 percent of foster students in King County and Seattle were completing high school. By providing the missing resources and guidance to students, TreeHouse hopes to expand the model to all Washington state counties.

Cleveland has struggled through the years to reduce youth violence. But important lessons have been learned, here and elsewhere. City officials say they are factoring those lessons into their latest plans to reduce violence among young men in the city.

An in-depth study of Texas youth crime records helped them find a path forward on juvenile criminal justice reform, but they still struggle with limited resources and a culture stuck on incarceration.