Improving Foster Care Outcomes

Floor Speech

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Ms. MOORE of Wisconsin. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Florida for heading up this Special Order hour.

At this time, we have many Members in the Congressional Black Caucus who are concerned about this issue. I am so happy this evening that we have also been joined by not only Jonathan Jackson but by a member of the Ways and Means Committee, a mentor of mine, Representative Danny Davis, who has served as a social worker and has kept abreast of those formal studies by engaging and being passionate about foster youth.

I thank the Congressional Black Caucus for shining a light on this particular issue. We must face it: These are our children.

There are about 400,000 children currently in foster care, not counting the ones who are in informal arrangements of foster care. They are our children. They are children of color, and particularly Black children are disproportionately in the system.

For example, I live in Wisconsin. While African Americans in Wisconsin make up only 9 percent of the population, almost a quarter of the children in foster care are African-American children.

I can tell you that these are the most vulnerable kids in our country, but my God, they are also the most resilient children. Even the most resilient need our help and our support. As Congress, we must support them because, after all, these youth are our future workforce. They are our workforce, and who will support us if we don't support them?

We just left May. May, of course, was National Foster Care Month. This year's theme of National Foster Care Month was ``Engaging Youth. Building Supports. Strengthening Opportunities.'' I think that that is a really important theme, as I want to announce happily that we are going to have another foster youth day, a shadow day. I invite all of my colleagues to engage in the extraordinary experience of letting one of these youth shadow you. You will be surprised that while you think that you are teaching them stuff about your craft as a ranking member or as a chairman, you will learn so much from these youth. That will be something that will carry through for the rest of your time serving. It is a blessing.

June is National Family Reunification Month. We have had a foster care system in this country for many years. One of the things that we have learned is that foster care ought to be the last resort and that if we separate children from their families out of necessity, we ought to do everything that we can to try to reunify them and to learn what strategies work toward that effort.

We want to do prevention to make sure that these children don't end up being separated from their families, but if they are, we need to prioritize kinship care.

One of the co-chairs of this committee is a Republican, Representative Don Bacon, and he is adamant about kinship care and keeping kinship groups together. That is one of his passions, and we need make sure we support his legislation.

We have another co-chair, a Democrat from California, Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove. She has come into this Congress, succeeding the now-mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, and gone headfirst into this issue and is a passionate supporter of our programming.

Mary Gay Scanlon, an attorney from Pennsylvania before she joined us in this body, brought those skills and her own experience doing a lot of pro bono work for children and families caught in the foster care system. She is a passionate co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth.

Representative Nancy Mace, who we all know as a person who has served in our Armed Forces, brings her leadership to this task. Representative Zach Nunn is another Republican in our group. It is a bipartisan group, and we need to save our children.

In just a few days, we are going to have the Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth's annual Foster Youth Shadow Day. We want Members to sign up to pair with a foster youth. I can't explain how impactful it is for these former foster youth to shadow my colleagues for just a day and how beneficial it is for us as policymakers. It is a great reminder that beyond these statistics are real people.

Madam Speaker, I have so much to say, but there are others here who want to share. I will be happy to get into a dialogue or colloquy with them.

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