First Focus Campaign for Children submitted the following testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means Subcommittee on Worker and Family Support to be entered into the record during a hearing on May 12, 2021, titled “Making a Difference for Families and Foster Youth.
Excerpt:
As an organization that focuses on children, we are committed to seeing past systems and their limitations. Our perspective allows us to see that youth in foster care are multi-faceted and in need of multidimensional supports. Foster youth are not just children in a system. Youth in foster care are students, workers, sibling and parents. They are patients in doctors’ offices, dentists’ offices, and mental health providers’ offices. They are residents in foster homes, grandparents’ homes and congregate settings. They are immigrant children, children of immigrants, members of federally recognized American Indian Tribes and citizens of the United States of America who have a right to have their civil rights protected. They are disproportionately Black, Latinex, Native American and LBGTQ+. Our job as advocates is to ensure that every system and policy advances the best interests of every child.