Supporting Systems-Involved Young People with Preparation for Adulthood

Format

Individual Presentation

Format

Individual Presentation

Presenters

Brittney Lee, University of Washington TacomaFollow

First Presenter's Institution

Amara

First Presenter’s Email Address

bigjuju777@gmail.com

First Presenter's Brief Biography

Brittney Lee experienced over seventeen foster placements in the span of just over seventeen years of her childhood. Their current aspiration is to utilize their growth and knowledge gained from resilience, community involvement and employment opportunities with youth who have experienced foster care and child welfare practitioners. Brittney consistently involve themselves in community conversations on child welfare and engages in opportunities where they can increase their understanding on how to best leverage their experience and meet their goals. One of those major goals is to become more educated on the subject of racial disproportionality in the child welfare system. Brittney hopes to work to come up with solutions to counteract racial inequality and institutionalized, structural racism that affects all youth involved in child welfare systems today. Having grown up living with dozens of other children in the system from various backgrounds and at all kinds of emotional, mental and spiritual levels, Brittney has unconditional compassion in their heart to give back to the youth in the communities similar to those in which they grew up in as well as on a national and global level. They wish to be a role model and source of support to youth experiencing foster care; to help them navigate all the ups and downs; to be the someone that Brittney needed when they were younger."

Submitter

I am submitting this proposal as one of the presenter(s)

Location

Percival

Strand #1

Heart: Social & Emotional Skills

Strand #2

Hands: Safety & Violence Prevention

Relevance

Helping young people who are systems-involved successfully transition into adulthood is prevention and safety work. For example, it's essential for youth that the adults directly around and responsible for them maintain and cultivate the young person’s existing relationships, and help reduce the barriers preventing these supportive relationships from flourishing, for when a young person moves out of the state, and exiting systems. Another way this matters is because young people who are systems-involved almost always need ways to manage and navigate their emotional and mental well-being. With training, kinship, adoptive, and resource families can better understand mental health basics, how it may show up post-traumatic events, how mental health disorders may run in families, and when they need to seek outside help to support their mental health. Mental health assessments and services can be offered and referred to youth and their parent(s) or guardian(s). By doing this, parents, guardians and youth may be able to prevent a crisis and/or be prepared to manage a crisis should one arise. Especially when young people leave systems and may have less access to a support system.

While young people are transitioning from foster care to adulthood, many lack the proper support and tools to ensure they thrive in their cognitive functioning, physical health and development, behavioral and emotional functioning, and social functioning. States are not held accountable to provide proper services and help young people establish resilience during their transition. When entering care, young people should be able to obtain peer social support, participate in their treatment plans, actively engage in their health care, receive quality legal representation and build/maintain relationships with their siblings in order to reduce the trauma of entry and this workshop will guide attendees into that. Systems-involved youth are also at risk of the violence of homelessness, trafficking, substance-use/abuse, unplanned pregnancy, unhealthy sexual and romantic relationships and more.

Brief Program Description

In this workshop we acknowledge that young people in foster care should be supported in planning for their transition to adulthood, in the same capacity non-system-involved peers. Throughout this workshop, we outline some opportunities for engagement to implement or further these preparations for young people.

Summary

In this workshop we acknowledge the fact that some non-system-involved peers are continuously gaining resources and tools for their successful transition into adulthood, and young people in foster care should be supported similarly in planning for their transition to adulthood, in the same capacity, early on through childhood and starting at the latest age 13. It’s important to start the conversation with youth so they can be equipped to establish well-being, normalcy, and the appropriate skills that youth identify to achieve success during and after they exit care. Throughout this workshop, we outline some opportunities for engagement to implement or further these preparations for young people.

I am a joint publisher on a policy piece filled with priorities around supporting youth aging-out of child & family welfare systems, that I worked on with other former foster youth around the nation. This was submitted directly to the Administration for Children & Families. I also have been on national panels with other lived experts and taken note of their direct expertise to compile, with total discretion, confidentiality and respect, the lessons learned from how states failed them or supported them properly upon aging out of systems. I take from my own story above all, of being in Washington states child welfare systems from ages 2 to 19, along with a sibling, and all of the ways I was supported or failed and what lessons I gleaned from that. In my time in foster care I lived with easily 25+ other former foster of all ages races genders and more and too incorporate their stories.

Evidence

I take direct quotes and evidence based studies methods and outcomes from childwelfare.gov and their peer-reviewed and sanctioned statistics to support my priorities and guidance in this workshop. I site these sources ethically and legitimately in my planning document, and presentation slides. It is my intent by including the priorities in this workshop, to encourage engaging youth at an earlier age to enhance successful young adulthood outcomes that are critical for youth to thrive. I will emphasize the critical role of young people with lived experience in this engagement of youth on track to age-out of systems as well, whether system-involved youth are moving towards permanency or lack thereof. States, tribes, jurisdictions, and agencies must engage young people (and others with lived experience in the child welfare system, such as parents, kinship caregivers and resource parents) across a continuum from the individual/family case level to systems-level change in foster care and child welfare services and in this workshop I outline some 101 level ways of how to begin doing so.

Learning Objective 1

Gain, garner and then spread awareness of the reality of aging-out state and national statistics to bring awareness of the risks young people face upon aging-out.

Learning Objective 2

Hear a direct experience, voices and storytelling of both the presenter and other lived experts, shared with discretion, confidentiality and respect of examples of ways states failed and supported them, in order to glean some empathy and understanding.

Learning Objective 3

We will identify nine opportunities for consideration and support to better engage youth upon exiting care, their, needs and more to keep in mind.

Keyword Descriptors

Prevention, permanency, poverty, homelessness, youth engagement, mental health, emotional well-being, aging-out, adulthood

Presentation Year

2025

Start Date

3-5-2025 9:45 AM

Recommended Citation

Lee, Brittney, "Supporting Systems-Involved Young People with Preparation for Adulthood" (2025). National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference. 72.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/nyar_savannah/2025/2025/72