Kaia Sand | Foster care shuffle series investigates issues, looks to solutions
This week culminates the five-part “Foster Care Shuffle” solutions journalism series.
This series, deftly edited by K. Rambo and written by Libby Dowsett, continues Street Roots’ commitment to dig deep and understand. We don’t short-cut our journalism.
“Placement instability is plaguing child welfare systems from coast to coast,” writes Dowsett. By studying national data on foster care placement stability and disruptions, she looked at states where children were shuffled from home to home less frequently — and researched what they were doing to get those results. This is the solutions strategy.
Georgia has tried pausing moving children long enough to rally a team knowledgeable about the child to explore best options. Iowa has tried insisting that the placement adapt to their needs, rather than moving the child. This week, Dowsett describes a treatment-based foster care that replaces group homes. If you missed any of this series, you can catch up at streetroots.org.
The trauma of instability within a foster care system compounds the traumas children already endure before they end up in foster care. At Street Roots, we look at what our society is doing now to impact the next generations. It’s not only current homelessness and other injustices we need to solve for, it’s future suffering that we strive to prevent.
I followed this series with a personal stake. I was a foster parent and then legal guardian. My daughter is now grown, and I am incredibly thankful that in our particular situation, we could build our family within relations – her biological family is deeply a part of our family, and her foster mom who she lived with from the ages of three to five maintained a loving presence until she died this past summer.
But my chest still grows tight when I picture my daughter at five years old, playing cards with her foster mom in the kitchen the day we came to pick her up to move into our house. She was composed as she had learned to be, reading the social situation as she learned to do. There are a million moments after that comprise that helped create our extremely close family, rich with love. But when I think about that moment, and then imagine children having those moments again and again, and often in a more abrupt fashion — it shatters the heart. It’s not even easy to write this now because of years of fiercely protecting my daughter’s stability so she could simply be a child.
From moving children from home to home to destroying our atmosphere with carbon and methane, too much about our society is destructive to children and their future. This series, funded and supported by the Solutions Journalism network, joins our enduring effort to not just report, but ask how we can do things better.
If we were looking to cut corners, we wouldn’t be committed to investigative journalism. But for us, journalism is part of our larger approach to a just societal transformation. The fact that people are on the streets suffering is not isolated from other injustices.
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Street Roots is an award-winning weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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