with

Margot Rawlins

Can you tell us a little about yourself, your organization, and your grantmaking portfolio?

I am an initiative officer at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation's Center for Venture Philanthropy. The Center was founded in 1999 as a way for philanthropists to connect more with the non-profit community and as a way to create pooled investment funds for a group of donors to address a major regional issue.

The fund I manage is called Fostering the Future. It helps young people, ages 11-25, who are emancipating from foster care or in kinship care. The blueprint is the Connected by 25 model, but we implement it in a different way. The centerpiece is an asset team, which consists of three asset coaches, a coordinator, a legal advocate, and a couple of housing advocates. They work with young people as service connectors to the things that empower and help the young people grow, concentrating on community-building and self-advocacy skills.

Within this fund we have four nonprofit partners to whom we award grants to do the work. One is a community college district that runs the independent living program for our county. We fund them to add extra capacity so that young people in informal kinship care (i.e., young people who are in out-of-home placement but not in any system) can learn the skills needed to become "independent" adults. Our legal advocate, employed by one of these nonprofits, works one-on-one with youth, helping them resolve a number of legal issues such areas as consumer law, dependency rights, and special education. The other two partners employ the asset coaches; one of the asset coaches specifically works with kinship youth and the other two coaches work with foster youth.

How did you become involved in YTFG and why?

I became involved with YTFG after first reading the Connected by 25 publication of the Foster Care Work Group. We first aligned our work with the Cby25 strategy and then, as I went to a couple of the meetings, I found that the information was very helpful to me. Because we are not a Cby25 site and do not have money to invest in the overall Cby25 work, there were times that I felt a little disconnected. However, YTFG has always been helpful to me. It has given me a broader perspective and helped me to understand issues for juvenile justice and struggling students. The Foster Care Work Group has helped me learned what is working in other areas, which is information that I wouldn't have access to otherwise. Plus, there are the connections and having people to call as resources.

Can you tell us about some of the projects that you are currently funding that pertain to disconnected youth issues?

Fostering the Future is the main project that pertains to disconnected youth issues. As part of the program, our asset coaches work with the young people on education, employment, permanency, and self-advocacy. The program works to connect the young people to the community. There have been some challenges because the young people become very attached to the asset coaches and end up using them as social workers. We have been trying to work on avoiding that so the asset coaches can help more young people.

We are looking at aligning general best practices in the youth development field with what we are doing and trying to see if there are particular issues that relate to foster care in youth development. One of the things we have learned is that one of the tenants of youth development is young people need to be given an opportunity to experience a little bit of risk and fear in order to prove to themselves that they can do things and gain self-esteem. That approach is antithetical to the way professionals in the child welfare system think. Child welfare is primarily concerned with safety and protection so the staff is often reticent to allow young people to take any risks, to prove to themselves that they can succeed. Therefore, our young people may suffer from low self-esteem and dependency upon the system.

If someone or an organization were interested in focusing on foster care, juvenile justice, or education reform, what would you advise as a starting point?

If that someone were a community foundation, I would advise them to first examine what is happening in their geographical region. Who is doing good work? How strong are the public-private partnerships? What are the region's particular needs? The next step would be to talk to other funders to see who is involved, what they are doing, and what types of gaps they're seeing. Additionally, they should work to gain as much knowledge as possible about the issue. These systems are all extremely complex, presenting a program officer with a steep learning curve.

If you had to choose one policy priority for 2008, as it relates to older youth, what would it be?

To give young people the option of either staying in foster care until they are 21 or emancipating if they feel ready. To provide them with some supports as they get older. All the research shows that today's young people don't go off on their own until the average age of 26. It doesn't make sense for us to expect it of foster youth at age 18 when they have had little or no support growing up.