Texas foster care youth need hope, healing and housing

(REECH) – The foster care system needs our help! More than 400,000 children enter foster care each year in the United States. According to EMPOWER, the community-based care contractor in Metroplex East – which includes Dallas – there are 18,000 children in foster care in Texas. And, there are not enough homes or parents that have stepped up to serve these children. So, children who are not adopted, placed with family members, or fictive kin, age out of foster care at 18 years old.The Dallas-Fort Worth area produces about 3,000 teens and young adults that age out of foster care every year – 23,000 age-out in the United States. Therefore, youth aging out of foster care has become a dire situation. And, because the foster care system is disproportionately Black, we are losing more and more Black teens and young adults to homelessness, incarceration, poverty, human trafficking and/or suicide. The suicide rate among Black youth has risen 58%.Related Stories As stated, aging out of foster care means that the teens and young adults were not adopted, so they have no home, no family, no support system on which to rely, and most of them have insufficient adult survival training/skills. Of...