The Rural Alliance for Diversity (RAD) is hosting an informational event on Wednesday, Sept. 29, at 6 p.m. to address the critical shortage of foster care providers in Harney County. The foster care system is meant to provide safe and healthy homes for children and youth, but our local child welfare services currently have to rely on counties as far away as the Portland Metro area to find homes for all youth in need. These remote placements can break any positive social connections children have within their communities and exacerbate the trauma of foster care.

While a limited pool of foster care providers affects all children in the foster care system, this lack is particularly acute for children with diverse identities, such as those who identify as LGBTQ+.

Queer youth enter the foster care system for many of the same reasons cisgender-heterosexual youth do: their birth families can’t provide them safe and healthy homes. However, rates of LGBTQ+ youth in the foster care system are higher than those of their peers. Two percent of all children wind up in the foster care system, but for queer youth, the rate is nearly double, often because they have been kicked out of their homes due to their queer identity. While around 10 percent of the total population is estimated to identify as LGBTQ+ in some way, 20 to 30 percent of youths in foster care have these identities. Queer youth in the foster care system also age out of it without permanent placements at much higher rates than their peers. They are also more likely to suffer emotional, physical, and sexual abuse while in the foster care system than other children. The problem becomes even worse if the child is also Latinx, Black, Indigenous, or another minority group. 

You can imagine that this kind of instability leaves deep scars on the queer youth who experience our foster care system. Due to a caregiver’s previously unidentified hostility toward their sexual orientation or gender identity, 78 percent of LGBTQ+ youth in the foster care system have run away from or been removed from their placements at some point. LGBTQ+ youth in foster care also experience bullying and mental health problems at very high rates, have lower grades, skip school because they feel unsafe, and have higher levels of substance abuse. Queer youth in the foster system are three times more likely than those outside of it to report a suicide attempt in the last year. 

But all is not lost. Having at least one supportive adult in their lives improves outcomes for LGBTQ+ youth by as much as 50 percent. Harney County residents who know that they can be supportive of diverse identities should step up. Can you help these children whose birth homes are no longer safe? Can you accept them for who they are? If you can’t, do you know someone else who might be able to become a foster host in Harney County and can you reach out and encourage that person to do so? Do you simply want to know more about becoming involved in foster care?

Residents who are not ready to open their homes to foster care children but would still like to make a difference in the lives of those children should be aware that the Department of Human Services has a mentorship program for foster children that they can also volunteer with. 

The meeting will be held at the Harney County Chamber of Commerce in the Community Room. It will also be accessible virtually through Zoom. Email rad.harneycounty@gmail.com for a link. Michelle Bradach of District 14 Department of Human Services (Harney, Grant, and Malheur Counties) will be speaking. She will inform the public about what it takes to be a foster care parent in general and a good home for LGBTQ+ children, in particular. All in-person attendees should expect to follow state mandated COVID safety guidelines, including masking.