Idaho Foster Care and How You Can Help.

Tosha Thomas
4 min readDec 11, 2022

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The Foster Care System in Idaho is supposed to be an integral part of helping children and families in Idaho. However, it is currently struggling to find children seeking placement foster homes. This has left social workers working in shifts watching over multiple kids in Airbnb’s. In order to help all of the children and families in Idaho we must come up with a way to educate and connect biological and foster families with resources to ensure every child has a safe and healthy home

Some Background

I wanted to first look at the biggest issues facing Idaho Foster Care, so I interviewed a current social worker. She was able to give me insight into the largest struggles that she faces every single day. I next wanted to gain some knowledge into what the general public knew of the current system in place. I prepared a quick survey that I was able to put out to the public. The questions were focused on their current knowledge of how to become a foster parent and of the resources currently available. I really wanted to be able to gain some insight on why there was a lack of foster families in Idaho.

Idaho Foster System makes such a large impact on families in some of their worst moments. They are responsible for meeting with biological families and deciding if it’s a safe environment for children. In those worst-case situations where children need to be removed, they are also responsible for finding placements for those children. These moments are extremely delicate and how they are handled can have lasting effects on children and families.

My Findings

After my research I discovered that people do not know a lot about the current system in place. This is important to note because those who are interested in becoming a foster parent often don’t know where to start.
I also took a look at current interest in becoming a foster parent. I wanted to look at interest compared to income as well as relationship status. This helps show that there is interest in becoming foster parents.
I then took a look at knowledge of foster care compared to opinions of foster care. I think this is an important piece to look at. It shows that opinions and knowledge vary and if we can educate and change the knowledge aspect, we could potentially sway the opinions of the foster system.

A Possible Solution

After taking in all of the data I have come up with a streamlined way to bring education and resources available to the public and allow those who cannot or choose not to foster other ways to get involved. This would be an educational website and a full digital campaign. The website will be easy to use and have steps lined out to become foster parents. The real star of the website though is that it will allow people to sign up to become a foster care resource. Social workers can then easily blast out emails with needs for either biological families to keep kids in their homes, or for kids who are just entering care. A lot of times bio families simply are short beds or just need help cleaning up their environment. Since social workers work so closely with families, they can really assess needs and get them out into the community quickly, instead of sitting on waitlists for current resources available.

In Conclusion

There are more kids than safe families in the Idaho Foster System. Most Idahoans are unaware of the resources available and procedures to become involved in fostering children. Idahoans want to help and believe all children deserve safe and happy homes but have no idea what is involved in doing so. By creating a site that allows the public to become educated on the steps needed to become a foster family or to sign up to be a very important resource in other ways as well. This can help keep families together and in situations where they cannot be kept together there will at least be an adequate number of healthy foster parents available.

Transparency

I have included a link to my raw data as well as the survey questions used for my research.

Raw Data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13LxoozhHFKMVVQxrzlGRmoUc3wI5ys6HF4P0kCjhrQI/edit#gid=1253140307

Survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSetQa2qJdo1mjVGk2WFxwHSCQVCgjz6MLRK7rlYcTfrDPhuKw/viewform

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