Youth Law Center Interview
The US foster care system is flawed. Red tape and inadequate protections hamper every child receiving the relationships they need to grow and thrive.
Youth Law Center helps children in foster care reach their potential by taking a holistic and inclusive approach to reform that is both top down and bottom up.
Find out how they are making foster care law more humane, more ambitious and more relationship-focused.
Listen here or find us on your favorite podcast app.
March 28, 2021
How Can We Improve the US Foster Care System?
#165 Great.com Talks With… Youth Law Center
There are over 400 thousand children in foster care in the USA. To get a fair shot at life, each one deserves the highest standard of help, support and encouragement. In this episode we talked with Jennifer Rodriguez from Youth Law Center about prioritizing love and strong childhood relationships in the foster care system.
Fighting for Justice for Children
Youth Law Center is a legal advocacy organization. They champion legal reform, fair interpretation and enforcement to make sure that the law works for all children in foster care and the juvenile justice system. Jennifer explains that the current system is overly bureaucratic. Sterile top-down regulations are designed to reduce general risk rather than help children reach their potential. One target might be to ‘make sure foster care children don’t die before the age of 18’. But wouldn’t you have higher aspirations for your own child?
YLC’s Quality Parenting Initiative encourages leaders in the public and private system to work with foster parents, birth parents, and youth - groups who are closest to children’s specific experiences - to refocus the system on more just goals. It’s important that as many leaders as possible recognize that a child’s relationships must come first if they are to thrive.
Listen to the whole interview to find out how Youth Law Center uses new research to drive positive change in the foster care system. You can also subscribe to YLC’s’s email list or donate.
Want to learn more about Youth Law Center? You can check out their news section and follow them on Facebook, Twitter and Medium.
Great.com was founded in 2017 with the goal of generating donations to stop climate change. The organization operates within the typically uncharitable online casino industry, where it tries to create something good out of something sometimes harmful. Great.com generates profits by competing with traditional casino companies in Google search rankings for online gaming signups coming from search terms such as slot games and online casino NJ. All profits are then donated towards causes fighting against climate change. So far They have generated donations of over $1.3 million.