Soul Care

Project Background

Young people with experience in foster care, who are primarily black and brown people of color, often experience complex trauma prior to entering foster care, while in care, and when transitioning out of care—yet many cannot access the type of culturally responsive, long-term mental health and wellness support they desire.

Existing systems and providers often struggle to meet the unique needs of these young people. Treatment relationships frequently end prematurely, before youth are able to experience the full benefit of mental health and wellness care. Providers offering culturally relevant care also struggle to scale their operations to meet the scale of need.

Knowing that foster youth need care more than ever, the New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), the Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health (OCMH), the Center for Fair Futures, Foster Youth Impact (FYI), and the Public Policy Lab (PPL) are launching an innovative collaboration to improve mental health outcomes for foster care youth. This project will receive overall coordination support from New Yorkers for Children.

Foster youth informed the project scope and will be a guiding voice throughout research, design, and implementation. Foster youth will continue to share their challenges around accessing services, engage in co-design sessions to ideate design concepts that address these barriers, and engage in the process of piloting and implementing the resulting products.

Young people in foster care engaged

Support staff engaged

What We're Researching

Participant Sample
We engaged 143 participants representing an array of roles and experiences within the foster care system and mental health services landscape in New York City, including: youth in foster care, mental health and wellness service providers, foster care agency staff, foster parents/family, and subject-matter experts.

Research Approach
Our research used a mixed-methods approach, combining primary research methods–a discovery survey, diary study, and semi-structured interviews–with secondary research. This combination of methods allowed us to capture diverse perspectives, understand the context of participants’ experiences, and generate actionable insights to inform the design of programs, tools, and communications aimed at improving mental health outcomes for youth in foster care.

Research Approach

Our research used a mixed-methods approach, combining primary research methods–a discovery survey, diary study, and semi-structured interviews–with secondary research.

Survey Through a youth-facing discovery survey, we asked questions about what services young people are interested in and what it’s like to try to find those services. The survey served as both a recruitment tool for us to invite a filtered set of youth to participate in subsequent research activities, and as a research tool to identify patterns and trends in youths’ mental health and wellness needs.

Diary Study Youth participants completed self-guided creative activities and reflections such as self-portraits imagining their “best selves” and vlogs depicting the spaces that ground them. The study uncovered nuanced insights that may not have emerged through other research methods, giving us a deeper look into participants’ daily routines, needs, and challenges. It also gave participants an opportunity to express themselves creatively while reflecting on the activities in private, on their own time.

Semi-Structured Interviews While the discovery survey and diary study were specific to youth, we used semi-structured interviews for all participant types, including mental health and wellness service providers, foster care agency staff, foster parents/family members, and subject-matter experts.

We aim to employ trauma-responsive practices in all of our interviews, but we adopted a specific trauma-responsive protocol for the fifteen interviews we conducted with youth. This protocol included allocating extra time to review the consent form, reminding youth that they could skip any questions or stop the interview at any time, acknowledging and validating youths’ feelings, and offering options of support if youth became distressed at any point during the interview. For youth under 18 years old, we secured consent from both the participant and their guardian and included an advocate for minors during interviews to make sure the youth felt comfortable throughout the interview.

What We Heard

"When I was 7 or 8, my case planners would change like every other month, every two to three weeks […] I loved that woman. I had seen her for a couple of months, and then she was gone.”

“One of the biggest struggles has been pushing for legitimacy. People who are not of hip hop or don’t identify with its cultural elements, there’s a stigma that can be very hard to push up against when working within systems."

“For me, they have to make therapy not feel like therapy.”

"It's hard to document the impact of my work with any kind of concrete metrics, but I need to figure something out because I need to be able to "prove" my program to funders. It's not as easy as quantifying a student's math progress."

“I think the most important thing is access. People have to wait so long to get services. Problems that could be hills become mountains."

“There’s obviously a big gap in relatability between the youth and the people providing services, and a lot of the therapeutic approaches we use today are based in Eurocentric ideology, so we know that it’s not necessarily meant for us folks of color.”

“Asking the foster parents what would help is a lot more helpful than the agency deciding this kid needs therapy, right? A foster parent might say, ‘actually, I think what this kid needs is music lessons or just something fun to do every week.’”

Service Landscape
The 103 youth who responded to the survey indicated the types of wellness activities they have tried and rated how impactful they believe each activity is in improving their mental health and wellbeing.

According to youth, participating in the arts and individual exercise are the two most impactful activities. Talking to a therapist is the most commonly tried activity but received a slightly lower impact score than other activities.

During interviews, young people expressed that they don’t always feel understood by their therapy provider and can find it difficult to open up in the therapy environment. They also had concerns about confidentiality when working with an agency-provided therapist. These are all factors that impact the therapy experience.

When asked about activities they would want to participate in but have not yet tried, many youth identified an interest in boxing/martial arts and individual exercise. Factors this project is seeking to address (cost, awareness, and access) received 48 responses, whereas other factors (such as not having time or general uncertainty) received 32 responses. This suggests that directing youth to these services would likely result in high engagement rates.

What We’ll Design

In direct collaboration with foster youth themselves, we will design programs, tools, and communications to increase access to culturally responsive mental health services, support mental health-based organizations in scaling their operations, and ultimately aim to improve mental health outcomes for foster youth in NYC.

Applicable tools and programs will be piloted in late summer 2024. The pilot will run for 18 months and will be implemented by the Center for Fair Futures, alongside partnering community-based organizations. The Public Policy Lab will provide lightweight support with implementation and will take the lead in evaluating the pilot.

Project Implementation

Upon completion of the pilot in the summer of 2026, we will synthesize our pilot learnings, revise our designs, and prepare the tools and programs to be implemented at scale by the end of 2026.

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Soul Care

Partners & Funders

The Project

The Outcome

Project Background

What We're Researching

What We Heard

What We’ll Design

Project Implementation

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Projects

Soul Care

Partners & Funders

The Project

The Outcome

Soul Care

Partners & Funders

The Project

The Outcome

Project Background

What We're Researching

What We Heard

What We’ll Design

Project Implementation

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Get in Touch

Interested in partnering with us?

Join Us

We’re always open to talking to folks with the skills, experience, and passion to join our team. Share your interest with us through our general application. To hear about future job announcements, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn or subscribe to our newsletter.

Follow Along

Social Media

Donate

We’re always open to talking to folks with the skills, experience, and passion to join our team. Share your interest with us through our general application.

To hear about future job announcements, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn or subscribe to our newsletter.