Summer co-parenting is one of those topics that exposes the gap between how blended and foster families look from the outside and what they actually require on a Wednesday in late June. When school is in session, the schedule does most of the work. The…
Every summer, youth-serving organizations across the country hire teenagers who spent the previous year as participants in their programs. A sixteen-year-old who aged out of the after-school mentoring program is now helping run the summer day camp. A high school junior who has attended your…
In May 2025, Camp Cho-Yeh in Livingston, Texas ran what most administrators would consider a thorough background screening. Before hiring a new camp counselor, the organization used a vendor to search the Enhanced Nationwide Criminal database, the Department of Justice Sex Offender Registry, Social Security…
The first time I tried a real vacation with a foster child, I planned it the way I would have planned any family trip. I researched the destination, planned the transportation, and made sure we had entertainment and snacks. What I had not planned for…
One of the things I learned slowly, too slowly, during my years as a foster parent was that I could not protect children into resilience. I tried. I arranged things so that failure was unlikely, intervened before frustration peaked, smoothed over conflicts that probably needed…
Staff turnover in youth-serving organizations runs as high as 40 percent per year. Most administrators treat this as an HR problem — a cost to manage, a vacancy to fill, a disruption to program continuity. The research says it is something more serious than that….
May is National Foster Care Month, a good time to think about how our youth organizations can help children in foster care. Not every organization is positioned to become a foster family, and we are not asking you to. But there is a wide space…
Building resilience in children from hard places is one of the things foster parents discuss most often when I attend conferences. It always comes up as a specific question: how, exactly, do you build it? And what does it look like when you are standing…
Mother’s Day is a complicated one. I am a mother: bio, foster, adoptive. I have an amazing mother…by legal paper. I was birthed by a mother that started with good intentions. I lived in the foster care system with many temporary mothers. I have…
This week your calendar has two observances that belong in the same conversation. National Foster Care Day fell on Tuesday. National Skilled Trades Day is today. That overlap is coincidental. The importance of trade school to foster youth is not. I have spent years working in…
May is National Foster Care Month. For administrators and direct-service staff of youth-serving organizations, it is worth treating this observance as something more than a social media post. It is an invitation to ask a practical question: does your organization understand the foster care experience…
When I was a foster parent, the question of “what comes after high school” sat differently for me and my kids than it did for most of my friends. The assumption in those conversations — that college was the next logical step, the obvious goal…