Leaving Foster Group Care with No Family Support
Leaving Foster Group Care with No Family Support
"Yeladim – The Council for the Child in Placement" is participating in a new project which aims to help young people who leave residential group care and foster family care without anywhere to go.
Each year, out of 400 young people who graduate from foster group and family homes, there are some 70 who have been in care for as many as fourteen to fifteen years. When they leave the residential group home or foster home, that has been their home for so many years, they find themselves at age 18 facing adulthood entirely on their own, without any family support.
The project is carried out in two variations: 1. Some graduates are helped while they are living in special apartments that have been organized within five of the residential group homes or in nearby rented apartments, 2. The rest are in apartments that have been rented for graduates of various group and foster family homes who are at various stages of preparation for army induction, employment searches or continuing their education. The Council accompanies these graduates in each of these stages and offers them the help of professionals who become parental figures offering them advice and support while they begin to stand on their own feet as independent adults.
In the future, the project will include a program of "life skills", which will be presented to children in residential group and foster family care who are in eleventh and twelfth grades. This program will include relevant subjects such as employment, apartment rental, handling personal financing, and forming intimate relationships.
This is a complex project because these young people are naturally seeking independence, but they are still in need of advice and guidance. On the one hand they want the experience of renting an apartment and living independently, while on the other hand they do not have the necessary skills to realize these goals.
There are a number of partners working together on this unique project: the Social Welfare Ministry, Joint-Ashalim, the Social Security Administration, the Ministry of Education's Settlement Administration, and the Council for the Child in Placement. All of these organization have come together in order to help these vulnerable young people in the hope that after the first three years, the government will recognize their special needs and will help to prevent them escape from the cycle of poverty into which they were born.
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