Grantee Blog:
A Relational Poem From Youth With Foster Care Experience
 Where to Land
by Anita and Jane
Something I’m always asked is
“What supports do I need to thrive?”
Things take time, hold your head up high
It’s usually followed up with
“How long were you in care?”
Stay strong and I always respond “five”
What I needed was structure
A place I could reside to have a relationship with my sister
and brothers
Patience, always have patience
A mentor to vent to that shows they truly care
And a TRIBE of people
who understand that life sometimes isn’t fair
And never jump to the worse case
In 2018, the Children’s Bureau awarded the Strengthening Child Welfare Systems to Achieve Expected Child and Family Outcomes cooperative agreement to develop, implement, and evaluate strategies that focus on better adoption outcomes. One of the grantees, the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare developed the Kansas Strong for Children and Families collaborative with its partners to enhance agency and court/legal practice and reduce systemic barriers. The following article was written by the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare.
Youth Voices From Foster Care, an initiative of Kansas Strong for Children and Families, is an arts-based digital storytelling project. Our objectives for Youth Voices comes from the call to action from the Children’s Bureau to honor and prioritize the voices of youth and families and enhance the capacity of the workforce to hear and act on the voices of youth and families.
We partnered with the Kansas Youth Advisory Council (KYAC) to build knowledge around youths’ lived experiences in child welfare and better understand the needs, hopes, and aspirations of youth in foster care. This information will be used to inform the other strategies of Kansas Strong and will be disseminated broadly to professionals who are responsible for developing effective services that meet the needs of children, youth, and families in Kansas and across the country.
We are using participatory action research, a methodology that values lived experience as knowledge and positions community members as experts and peers within a research project, to guide this project. KYAC members designed the project as a versatile and inclusive art project where youth participants are invited to share their experiences in foster care through the creation of individual and/or collective artwork. Each participant can choose what kind of art project they want to make (i.e., drawing, photography, writing, or some other form of creative expression), and their artwork will be a response to the following prompts developed by KYAC members:
- What supports do I need to thrive?
- What did I appreciate about a caseworker who helped, impacted, or supported me?
- What advice would I give to others about how to communicate with me?
- What information is most helpful for me to have?
- What insights do I wish my foster parents or placement provider had?
The relational poem and related artwork above were made in video chat sessions facilitated by a member of the research team. During these sessions, participants first wrote individual poems using one or more of the prompts listed above. Next, each person read their poem out loud, and then the group worked together to weave lines from each of their poems into one collective poem.
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