As Members of this Subcommittee, we have the solemn responsibility to ensure that our child welfare system always acts in the best interest of children and families. When we cannot keep children safe with their families, we owe youth our very best effort to keep them in affirming, supportive, family settings while preserving connections to kin and community.
This pandemic presented foster youth and struggling families with especially terrifying challenges. I am deeply proud of my work with Ranking Member Walorski and our Subcommittee colleagues to enact legislation to provide critical short-term tools to help prevent hardship, homelessness, and despair for these youth and families. But looking ahead, we still have much to do.
This Congress, our Subcommittee must reauthorize laws that provide states with critical funds for family stabilization, reunification, adoption, better coordination with the courts, and to address family substance abuse challenges. Also, we must work to ensure full implementation of the Family First Prevention Services Act to realize our goal of a child welfare system truly focused on keeping families together. We need to modernize the Chafee Independence Program and take further action to support grandparents and relatives who play such critical roles for youth whose parents are struggling.
In addition, I hope we can work together to advance a priority bill for our late friend and colleague, John Lewis. John’s lifelong fight against discrimination included championing the Every Child Deserves a Family Act, a bill that would protect foster youth and foster parents from discrimination based on religion, marital status, and who they love. Our clear duty is to ensure that each and every child in foster care finds a loving, affirming family.
I want to work to make things better. I want to ensure the facilities working with foster youth protect their safety so that foster youth like Cornelius Frederick do not die from aggressive restraints. I want to ensure that grandmothers like Ma’Khia Bryant’s don’t have to put their grandchildren in foster care because they can’t afford a bigger apartment. I want to take action: to reduce the racial disparities in child welfare; to bolster the legal representation for parents, youth, and kinship caregivers; to help foster youth gain independence through driving; to promote meaningful relationships between foster youth and their incarcerated parents; and to use peer mentors to help parents and foster parents.
We have a lot to do, and I believe we have the commitment for change. We have excellent guides in current and former foster youth, who have been so honest with us about their lives and what they need. Today, we are privileged to be joined by two such youth as well as by several adults who have devoted their lives to working on behalf of youth and families. I look forward to hearing them, and then taking action together.
