OPINION: Alaska’s foster care shortfall is damaging our future

Alaska is facing a foster care crisis. The good news is that with your help we can fix what harms our children the most.

Today Alaska has a damaging shortage of foster homes. We should never tell children that a home is too much to ask for. All children deserve a loving place to call home, and not to bounce between temporary homes or sometimes worse. If it’s the right time in your life we can help you provide a home for a child who deserves one.

Before the upheaval caused by COVID-19, we already didn’t have enough quality, loving homes. Since then, Alaska has lost roughly 30% of our foster homes. Today, finding a quality, loving home for Alaska’s roughly 3,000 foster youth may be harder than it’s ever been. The casualty is precious children, and their right to love, happiness and opportunity in life.

The shortage of loving foster homes creates heartbreaking problems. Without enough quality foster homes, youth often bounce between temporary foster parents who’ve already opened their homes to as many youth as they can. Many of these families can only answer the call to help an additional child for a few weeks. A system that relies too often on short placements of a few weeks, or maybe a month, can cause more trauma as youth enter a cycle that bounces them from one home to another. Children, many of whom have already suffered great trauma, suffer more trauma every time they’re told they have to leave one home and move to a different one.

Sometimes it’s worse. We know there are youth who have sat in hospital rooms because there’s no home available for them.

This shortage also impacts youth with significant mental and behavioral health conditions. Foster homes for these youth are called “therapeutic.” They help youth stabilize in a home, remain with a loving family, and avoid hospitalization or extended, unnecessary hospital stays while caseworkers search for an available home. Today Alaska, and our youth, face a harmful shortage of therapeutic foster homes.

If it’s the right time in your life to open your home to a youth who deserves love and care, you won’t be asked to do this all by yourself. There are groups with expertise to help you navigate the system and get the training you need.

In Anchorage we have two nonprofit organizations that help train and support new and existing therapeutic foster parents, AKChild & Family, and Denali Family Services.

We are also lucky to have a statewide nonprofit that helps new and existing foster families, both traditional and therapeutic, find the help and resources they need. That’s the Alaska Center for Resource Families.

Alaska’s tribal entities across the state also do great work with foster families for our Alaska Native foster youth. Here are some resources we hope you’ll reach out to.

Therapeutic foster parenting:

• AKChild & Family: 907-792-4118; email: beafosterparent@akchild.org; website: www.akchild.org.

• Denali Family Services: 907-274-8281; email: info@denalifs.org; website: www.Denalifs.org.

Foster parenting in general:

Alaska Center for Resource Families: 907-479-7307; email: acrf@nwresource.org; website: www.acrf.org.

Our regional Alaska Native Corporations have family services entities that also help find great homes for great youth.

We hope you’ll consider helping. If it’s not the right time for you, but you know someone who might want to help, please share this with them.

If you want to help a foster youth, but can’t become a foster parent right now, please consider mentoring a foster teen. Big Brothers Big Sisters of Alaska helps match foster youth with mentors in Anchorage and the Mat-Su region through their SYNC program. Foster youth, as they get ready to journey toward adulthood, need stable adults in their lives whom they can trust and talk to.

You can become a SYNC mentor by contacting info@bbbsak.org or 907-290-2657.

We all find our own ways to make life better for others. Thank you so much for considering ways you or others you know might help our precious foster youth in need. May is National Foster Care Month, and there’s no better time to share the great needs of our foster youth.

Anne Dennis-Choi is the CEO of AK Child & Family, whose mission is to bring hope to troubled young lives through a broad range of mental health services.

Les Gara is a former foster youth, co-founder of Alaska’s foster youth mentorship program and a former Alaska legislator and Assistant Attorney General.

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