Want to end foster care? Listen to young people who’ve lived it.
By David Samuel Hall
Like many youth who have been in foster care, I was stuck in a cycle within the child welfare system, unable to find stability for many years. I was removed from my family not because of an unsafe situation, but because the system was unable to offer my family the type of services and concrete supports that truly could have brought stability. To keep families together in the first place, we should commit to providing the tangible supports they need to be together successfully. In joining the call for strong and thriving families, it is our obligation to ensure a family can be self-sustaining.
Families — not foster care — are the first line of support for a child. When we provide families with the right resources, tools and support services, they flourish. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true. A recent study by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago found that reduced economic support alone increases foster care entries by 12.7%. The way to keep families together could not be more clear: we must provide the services and concrete supports families need.
I was 8 years old when I was first removed from my family and placed with a foster family I’d only seen one time before. After enough grievances, I was moved to my grandparents. Staying could have been the ideal situation, but they weren’t equipped to care for a child with PTSD from previous environments. As kinship caregivers, they were not afforded the training and ongoing services that many foster parents receive. So I was removed from the familiar care of my grandparents and placed in multiple inpatient facilities where my “care” consisted of negligence and overmedication. It became clear — to me and to the system in charge of my care — that foster care was no longer a safe space. As a result, I was hastily and unsuccessfully reunited with my family.
The reunification wasn’t facilitated with meaningful services that could have strengthened my family to function sustainably and even thrive. Had we received supports such as mental health services, child care and supportive housing, my first reunification might have been successful, and I would be writing a very different story. Instead, due to a lack of support for my family, I was placed in care again — this time on Christmas Day at the age of 16 — for the same exact, unaddressed reasons. While my experience in foster care was exceedingly better the second time around by joining a family where I was wanted, needed and loved, my only desire was to stay with my family.
My goal had always been to get back home, but after the previous unsuccessful reunification, I knew things had to be different before I could rejoin my family. We needed concrete supports, and we needed them to be coordinated among the various providers of mental health services, child care and supportive housing. These types of supports are the most effective intervention for reuniting families and for keeping them together in the first place. Even now, 50% of youth in foster care return home — and that’s without holistic services. Imagine what could happen if families receive the economic support and services that they need. Simply put, I could have returned home so much earlier if the systems and society put these types of services in place. It is critical that agencies, courts and communities come together to listen to families and support them to the best of our ability.
I know we can do better because I have already seen state after state do so since the last time I was in care. I have seen improvements in my home state of Oklahoma, such as House Bill 2552 (Foster Youth Bill of Rights) and Senate Bill 893 (Foster Youth Caregiver Tax Deduction). After years in the child welfare system, I have devoted myself to the betterment of families. Like many alumni who’ve experienced this system firsthand, I know many of the policy changes necessary to support children and families. We can change the rules. Since I began my legislative advocacy, the Oklahoma Legislature has had more studies and pieces of legislation affecting families written in the past four years than the prior decade.
Today, my family and I have a self-sustaining, healthy relationship that has come after years of boundary setting and therapy. I know this could have come sooner if we would have had the support we needed. My time in care gave me boundless patience and ruthless determination, which I use to uplift the voices of other young people who have experienced foster care, educating others about the tangible solutions to family separation and effectively supporting those in our child welfare system. I will not settle, nor will I ever be satisfied, until all families can happily stay together.
David Samuel Hall’s drive allowed him to serve in the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute under Congressman Adam Smith, coordinate and present an interim study for the Oklahoma House of Representatives Committee on Children, Youth and Families, and establish a mutually beneficial relationship with members of various state and municipal agencies. As a result, he has been at the forefront of introducing a model legislative package in his state legislature, where he has had nearly a dozen bills he wrote introduced, most of which have passed at least one chamber unanimously, and had the first bill he wrote signed by the governor before he even graduated college.
His service and appointments have included the Oklahoma Advisory Group for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention; Casey Family Programs’ 21st Century Child Welfare System Steering Committee; and the Oklahoma City Human Rights Commission Task Force, where he was later elected to serve as the chair of the Policy and Legislation Committee. Today, this next-generation public servant is teaching others how to successfully change systems through forums, lectures, workshops, keynotes, radio shows and more, including thriving as a contracted consultant for the Capacity Building Center for States, National Resource Center for Youth Services and his own independent consultation practices.
