Your gift creates hope and belonging for kids in foster care.
With your support, we're helping kids in foster care build or rebuild connections to safe, loving, permanent families.
With your support, we're helping kids in foster care build or rebuild connections to safe, loving, permanent families.
Every year in Minnesota, more than 11,000 kids experience out-of-home placement. Most of these kids will safely return home when their parents get the help they need. But some will spend years in foster care - some their entire childhoods. About 350 Minnesota teens will age out of foster care each year with no legal family and no formal support system.
These precious young people are far more likely to experience homelessness, poverty, mental health problems, early pregnancy, incarceration, and other serious life challenges.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
At Ampersand Families, we’re working upstream and downstream to get kids out of foster care and into safe, permanent families and communities with an urgency that honors the brevity of childhood.
Chantal and A’Shayla, pictured above, are an Ampersand Family. A’shayla spent years in foster care, stuck in the system. Her grandma Chantal desperately wanted to get her out. But she faced barriers in the complex and racialized child welfare system. Ampersand Families helped her overcome those barriers and bring A’shayla home.
“They do an exceptional job,” she says. “Without their help, I wouldn’t have been able to adopt my granddaughter.”
We’re proud of the work we do to help kids in foster care find family, prioritizing relatives and kin whenever possible. Last year, we:
- Identified and engaged 100+ relatives and kin per child as potential permanency resources for 43 “hard to place” older youth in foster care.
- Identified and engaged 100+ relatives and kin per child as potential placement resources for kids of any age just entering the child welfare system.
- Celebrated 15 finalized adoptions of “hard to place” older youth with permanent families.
- Provided ongoing support, programming, and resources to kinship and adoptive families to help them build community, support each other, heal from trauma, and thrive.
Read more about our work on our website or in our FY24 Annual Report.
Thank you for supporting this work!