MAY 2003 SPOTLIGHT:

MAY IS NATIONAL FOSTER CARE MONTH

Personal tragedies – such as abuse, neglect, family breakdown, the death of caregivers – exist whenever a child enters foster care; approximately 500,000 children are in foster care on any given day in the U.S.

Such tragedies exist in all parts of society, and may affect refugee children who resettle in the U.S. with parents or other caregivers.

Most children in foster care face challenges related to separation from their family of origin, grief and loss. All children experiencing foster care are placed in a dependency relationship outside their family of origin. Upon removal from their normal way of life, developmental processes for ethnic identification and self-sufficiency are altered for these youth.

In addition to the challenges of being in an out-of-home placement, refugee foster children must also confront issues of adaptation and biculturalism on a daily basis, as do all refugee children in the U.S. They struggle to develop and maintain a healthy sense of self and a connection to their cultures, ethnicities, languages and religions.

Specialized Refugee Foster Care

Some refugee youth separated from their parents or customary caregiver overseas are granted the status of unaccompanied refugee minor (URM) by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the United States. Unaccompanied Refugee Minors may be resettled in the U.S. through the Office of Refugee Resettlement and placed in specialized refugee foster care within the network of URM programs.

Under certain conditions, including the absence of appropriate local placements, other children may be able to receive special refugee foster care services from the URM system. Click here for more information, including the process for having a child reclassified to URM status.

BRYCS Responses

BRYCS is working, through cross-service training, collaboration, and consultation, to minimize foster care placements that result from culturally or linguistically inappropriate child welfare services.

We provide guidance to refugee-serving agencies assessing the suitability of home environments for the potentially vulnerable population of children in the care of non-parental caregivers, so proactive steps can be taken to support the child and family.

BRYCS is also addressing the needs of refugee children in public foster care through two projects. We are:

1. hosting a Refugees and Foster Care Roundtable to generate ideas for how refugee communities can be resources to children in public foster care, and
2. developing materials based on promising practices from the refugee foster care system.

Refugees and Foster Care Roundtable

The Refugees and Foster Care Roundtable will bring together representatives of refugee communities and foster care agencies, to generate ideas for meeting the cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious needs of refugee children in the public system.

If you are aware of a mutual assistance association (MAA) which has shown leadership on foster care, or a public foster care program which has proactively addressed the needs of refugees and other newcomers, please let us know.

Send suggestions and contact information to BRYCS Roundtable organizers Salah Hammad and Aronda Howard at shammad@usccb.org, or call 202-541-5409.

Promising Practice Materials

BRYCS has held discussions with the Unaccompanied Refugee Minor programs to better understand techniques used in recruitment, training and retention of refugee and other newcomer foster families, as well as other promising practices for meeting the cultural, linguistic and religious needs of refugee youth in foster care. We are currently developing promising practice resources; watch our homepage for updates this summer.

You can read about last month's spotlight on child abuse prevention here.