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Roadmap to Action
- Talk to foster youth and their adult advocates.
- Learn about your city, district and county's emancipating youth. How many are there? What services are being provided? How are schools tracking them?
. Learn and plan across jurisdictions, departments, agencies and sectors.
- Invite business, service, faith-based, youth-led, and community-based organizations to help diagnose and address the situation for foster youth aging out of the system in your community.
- Include foster youth and former foster youth in designing and assessing the effectiveness of programs. This may include a stipend and help with transportation.
- Develop shared measures of success, such as high school graduation, completion of California State University admission requirements, workforce readiness, and a permanent home.
- Investigate and build upon lessons from islands of excellence, such as lessons from California Connected by 25 Initiative, New Ways to Work, community planning models, ombudsman models, interagency and intergenerational models like San Pasqual Academy, internship programs, and data sharing models.
- Link agencies and systems
- Cross-train across agencies, programs.
- Link Workforce Investment Act programs with Independent Living Programs.
- Identify and address data sharing barriers.
- Identify and address policy barriers.
- Build public awareness.
- Utilize your communications staff to share promising stories and build new partnerships.
- Plan to celebrate the National Foster Care Month in May.
- Pass a resolution to address the needs of emancipating youth (See Appendix C for a sample resolution)
- Information and Referral. Develop mechanisms for all foster youth and their guardians to become aware of existing and local supportive services such as THP-Plus, California Youth Connection (www.calyouthconn.org), Independent Living Skills Program (ILP), Chaffee Vouchers, Medi-Cal to age 21, www.fosteryouthhelp.ca.gov, 211 systems and others. (See glossary)
- Care Giver Support. Explore peer-support models for caregivers. Outreach to kinship care providers who often are unaware of available resources.
- Coach guardians and youth on meeting high school graduation and college admissions requirements and on available resources.
- Utilize kinship databases to identify relatives of children in child welfare.
- Ensure all schools understand and implement AB 490, which allows foster youth to be immediately enrolled in a school without cumulative files and medical records, and requires partial credit for course work completed.
- Ensure all your foster youth have educational passports –records of where they have gone to school, credits accumulated, grades, etc.
- Ensure all group homes are teaching to state educational standards.
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