We are pleased to share with you the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute’s (CCAI) 2014 Foster Youth Internship (FYI) Report Shaping Tomorrow with Today’s Minds.  In it, former foster youth share their personal experiences and creative federal policy recommendations that address a range of child welfare issues, including:

• Giving Youth a Voice: Contact After Involuntary Termination of Parental Rights
• Increasing Stability for Infants and Toddlers in Care
• Essential Documentation for Youth in Care
• Addressing the Trauma: Treating Children’s Mental Health with Screening and Assessments
• Creating Best Practice Standards for the Intersection of Immigration Enforcement and the Child Welfare System
• Renewing the System’s Commitment to Child Well Being: Fostering Resilience through Trauma Informed Training
• Providing Comfort and Information to Children Transitioning into the System
• Stolen Pasts, Corrupted Futures: Preventing Identity Theft for Youth in Foster Care
• Empowering Foster Youth through Case Plan Trainings to Increase Youth’s Acceptance Rate of Extended Foster Care
• Helping Foster Youth Overcome Barriers to Employment
• Improving Educational Outcomes for Foster Youth: Special Education and Mental Health

In past years, the Foster Youth Interns’ reports have generated both local and national attention to the critical issues facing the nearly 400,000 children currently in or transitioning out of the United States foster care system.

“A core value of our work at CCAI is to bring those with experiential knowledge of child welfare policy and practice to Washington, D.C., to share their firsthand accounts with policymakers such as the 150 Members of Congress in the Congressional Coalition on Adoption. The Foster Youth Internship program is designed to do just that. Once again this summer, our interns have combined their individual life experiences in foster care across the nation with what they have learned about federal child welfare policy during their internships in the U.S. Congress. The result is this report filled with their innovative ideas to solve challenges they and other children in foster care face growing up in the system,” CCAI’s Interim Executive Director Becky Weichhand wrote in the report.

The electronic copy of the Foster Youth Interns’ 2014 report is available here!