Creating Better Foster Placements for Teens
Co-designing with youth formerly in foster care to close the placement gap for teens.
Child welfare agencies struggle to find and prepare foster families willing and able to give teens long-term, stable placements. Working directly with youth formerly in care — using flexible, trauma-informed engagement rather than fixed group workshops — this project surfaced five concrete recommendations covering foster-family training, youth transition support, mental health care, relationship-building, and adulthood-preparation services.
The challenge
Agencies needed strategies to close the gap between the number of teens needing placement and the number of families willing, ready, and able to provide it — centered on how youth themselves define a successful placement.
My role
I facilitated kickoff activities, wrote the research plan, conducted desk research, led participant recruitment, moderated interviews, ran co-design workshops, and led analysis, synthesis, and the final presentation.
Methods
Desk research; a case study with one child welfare agency; conversations with 45 people including subject matter experts, child welfare staff, foster families, and youth formerly in care. Engagement was designed around three formats — 1:1 interactive sessions, a co-design workshop, and self-guided survey responses — to meet youth where they were rather than forcing everyone into the same format.
I built a "What We Know So Far" activity specifically so youth could give feedback on our research assumptions and act as advisors — without needing to retell difficult personal history. Letting participants critique our thinking, rather than re-narrate their trauma, got us better input and cost them less.
Key insight
Being a teen in the system is a deeply disempowering experience: needs aren't consistently met, teens lack autonomy and involvement in decisions about their own lives, and they need more scaffolding to practice the skills adulthood requires.
Recommendations
- Better training for foster families and child welfare staff
- Improved support for youth transitions
- Quality mental health care
- Opportunities to build sustained relationships with caring adults
- Services that help teens prepare for adulthood
Recruiting youth was, as anticipated, difficult. I responded with persistent outreach — cold-calling community organizations, social media outreach, text reminders to reduce no-shows — and used a screener with unique tracking links to learn which channels actually worked.
Deliverables
Every participant received a memo summarizing what we heard and what happens next — a small thing, but it signals respect for participants' time as more than a data source.