In 2021, the Youth Law Center (YLC) and California Youth Connection (CYC), with the support of the Tipping Point Community, partnered with Institute for the Future (IFTF) to reimagine extended foster care through a youth-centered, future-focused lens. By leveraging IFTF's expertise in foresight, this collaboration aimed to identify key future forces shaping the experiences of young adults over the next decade.
The Challenge:
California's extended foster care system (EFC) is intended to provide a safety net for youth ages 18-21 as they transition from foster care to adulthood. Yet, as the clock ticks towards 21, too many young people find themselves stepping off a cliff, unprepared and unsupported for the challenges ahead. Statistics show that 73.8% of youth with foster care experience face financial insecurity, 22% have experienced homelessness, and many lack access to essential technology. These stark numbers paint a picture of a system that needs urgent transformation. Jennifer Rodriguez, Executive Director of YLC, captured the essence of the problem when she said, "We are giving young people a horse and buggy to get on the freeway when everyone else has a self-driving electric car”. Her words underscore the urgency of preparing youth for a future that is rapidly evolving beyond the current system’s capabilities.
The Approach:
IFTF designed a multi-phase process aimed at learning from young adults with extended foster care experience and empowering them with futures skills. The process, which integrated collaborative research, foresight training, and expert engagement, unfolded in distinct phases, each building upon the insights and engagement of the previous stage:
Phase 1: Setting the Foundation. IFTF, YLC, and CYC co-established key research questions and working principles rooted in the needs of the youth they served. Panel sessions with young adult representatives from CYC and YLC staff members were pivotal to this phase. These discussions provided IFTF with key insights into the current realities and future possibilities of extended foster care, ensuring that the process was informed by those with lived experience.
Phase 2: Foresight Training and Youth Engagement. We conducted an interactive foresight training session with 34 CYC members and YLC staff. This training, co-designed with CYC's training expert, introduced participants to IFTF's Foresight-Insight-Action cycle. The session focused on equipping participants with the mindsets and tools needed to recognize changes already occurring around us, identify emerging possibilities, and ultimately transform the way they think about the future.
The co-designed process was essential in adapting IFTF's signature training curriculum to meet the needs of this audience. For example, during the planning and design phase, we collaboratively identified four topics for the training: education and employment, housing, health and wellness, and lifelong connections. We also tailored the training logistics to maximize accessibility, such as hosting virtual trainings in the evening and ensuring that the apps, tools, and slides were accessible by cell phone and computer, thereby expanding the possibility of participation.
Following the training, CYC hosted debriefing sessions where youth applied their newly acquired foresight skills by creating flyers for future programs they envisioned. This hands-on exercise allowed participants to immediately put their learning into practice, reinforcing the concepts and demonstrating their relevance to real-world scenarios.
Phase 3: Expert Futures Workshops. IFTF organized two three-hour virtual Futures Workshops, bringing together 18 subject-matter experts from diverse fields across the country. YLC provided recommendations for experts, and IFTF made the final selections. The experts represented a wide range of areas, including social design, adolescent health, digital media, housing innovation, government, and the impacts of climate change on mental health. This diversity of perspectives enriched our understanding of the evolving landscape of youth transition to adulthood.
These workshops were structured to encourage open exchange of ideas and deliberate futures work. For example, participants were asked to create a “day-in-the-life” scenario for a young adult navigating the transition into adulthood in 2032. The alternative future personas, which served as anchors for this scenario-building exercise were created by a CYC member and an IFTF staff member, ensuring that the scenarios were grounded in real experiences and challenges faced by youth in extended foster care.
Phase 4: Youth Interviews and Ethnographic Foresight. IFTF conducted nine individual 90-minute virtual interviews with youth currently in or recently exited from California's EFC program. These interviews utilized ethnographic foresight, a qualitative methodology rooted in anthropology, designed to build insight into complex cultural phenomena and practices from direct observation and interviews with members of a community of interest.
In foresight research, the community of interest typically includes the innovators or early adopters of new tools and practices — the pioneers who are living the future today. YLC and CYC assisted in recruiting participants by sharing an interest form with their partners. From these submissions, IFTF selected individuals who, through their lived experience, revealed critical insights about the future ecosystem for EFC.
Participants represented a range of experiences, including those with prior involvement in the justice system, young parents, those with special health needs, and those who have experienced displacement due to climate catastrophes. These interviews, which focused on EFC experiences, social connections, and future outlooks, provided invaluable first-hand insights into the system's strengths and weaknesses. Participants received an honorarium for sharing their time and expertise.
Throughout this process, we remained committed to amplifying youth voices and experiences. By combining youth perspectives with expert insights and futures thinking, we created a robust foundation for reimagining an extended foster care system that truly serves the needs of transition-age youth.
The Transformational Forces:
Drawing on insights from stakeholder engagement and research, IFTF applied its foresight capabilities to distill the most impactful and transformative forces on the horizon. We looked at the ecosystem of support, services, and opportunities that young adults leaving the system need to thrive, informed by subject-matter experts and youth perspectives. After multiple rounds of collaborative feedback, we finalized the report and developed a short video. This video was co-designed and narrated by young adults with lived experience in EFC, ensuring that their voices and perspectives were at the forefront of the narrative. These forces are highlighted in detail in the report, On the Threshold of Change, and brought to life in the video. They are:
Equitable Transitions: By 2035, EFC will ensure all youth have stable housing, financial security, education, and essential skills, replacing patchworked services with universal access.
Restorative Care: The system will shift to holistic healing, addressing trauma and promoting long-term well-being.
Relational Design: EFC will focus on building family ties and social connections, fostering interdependence over independence.
Computational Advantage: The system will boost digital skills, empowering youth to actively shape their futures with technology and AI.
Together, these four forces push beyond current limitations, paving the way for a future of equity, restoration, relationships, and technological empowerment in extended foster care. They challenge existing structures, reimagining support for youth to ensure everyone has the resources and connections to thrive.
The Impact:
Key insights from the partnership include:
1. Designing Foresight for Policy/Advocacy: Strategic foresight allows us to envision radically different futures, moving from reactive problem-solving to proactive future-readiness — a powerful tool for driving policy and practice change. By analyzing emerging trends, we can design policies and systems that anticipate future conditions rather than merely patching current gaps. This shift in thinking is essential for creating lasting, meaningful change.
The foresight process transformed what once seemed to be "impossible" ideas into realistic possibilities for youth advocates by drawing from real-life examples of drivers and signals of change. For instance, under equitable transitions, we see examples of guaranteed income and housing already being implemented by some counties in California through pilot programs. Another example is Black Workers Centers — trust-based, culturally unique organizations that provide critical support networks for people facing barriers in employment and stigma in promotion and pay. These real-world examples helped leaders in foster care envision new approaches in economic stability.
Foresight has already resulted in concrete change for YLC and CYC. It contributed to the passage of California’s billion-dollar foster care rates proposal, which will fund holistic well-being activities, effectively bringing the future into the present, and prioritizing the extension of a California Public Utilities Commission pilot program, ensuring that youth in foster care have access to cell phones and the internet, thus building towards digital dexterity.
Futures thinking itself is a powerful advocacy intervention. When young people were invited to think about their futures by describing and defining them, it gave them a sense of agency and strengthened their advocacy efforts. This is especially impactful for those who have been led to believe that only certain people get to shape the future, or worse, that their futures are preordained.
2. Diverse Experiences Enrich Foresight: Bringing together a wide range of perspectives enhances creative visioning and uncovers unexpected opportunities for collaboration. By exploring challenges across sectors and identifying potential partnerships, we developed richer visions of the future and plausible solutions. Engaging with fields like neuroscience, design, technology, and climate change integrates diverse insights, fostering the innovative thinking our future demands. The voices of those with lived experience were crucial in shaping the transformational forces; their active participation was indispensable.
This insight challenges advocacy organizations to broaden their networks and engage with diverse stakeholders, including those with different belief systems or approaches. It also underscores the need for funders and investors to support future-focused planning, building a stronger, more adaptable foundation for the challenges ahead and ensuring today’s investments have lasting impact.
Conclusion:
At IFTF, we are committed to supporting organizations and communities to become future-ready. Building on our partnership with YLC, we will continue this work by hosting a Youth Futures Summit in 2025, bringing together young adults, tech developers, social innovators, and futurists to imagine, design, test, and refine AI tools in EFC. This summit will be a space to discuss the implications—both intended and unintended—of future innovations in support services, policy changes, and emerging technologies.
We deeply value the partnership between our organizations and the trust we've built together. We invite others to join us in leveraging IFTF's methodologies to co-create resilient systems with the communities they serve. Together, we can turn possibilities into realities, ensuring a future where every young person has the opportunity to thrive.
Call to action to click through: https://www.iftf.org/projects/...
About Youth Law Center:
The Youth Law Center (YLC) advocates to transform foster care and juvenile justice systems across the nation so every child and youth can thrive. YLC’s work aims to ensure that children are not only protected from harm and dangerous conditions, but also receive the support, opportunities, and love they need to grow up healthy and happy. For decades, YLC has led the field to transform systems to be truly child-focused and research-informed through litigation, policy reform, media advocacy, collaborative system change projects, training and advice, and public education. ylc.org
About California Youth Connection:
The mission of California Youth Connection (CYC), a youth-led organization, is to develop leaders who empower each other and their communities to transform the foster care system through legislative, policy, and practice change. CYC’s vision is that all foster youth will be equal partners in contributing to all policies and decisions made in their lives. All youth in foster care will have their needs met and the support to grow into healthy and vibrant adults.
(1) Think of Us, “COVID-19 MicroCash Grant Application Data”, March 2021, https://www.thinkofus.org/case-studies/%20microcash-grant-covid-19-data.
(2) John Burton Advocates for Youth, “Hanging on by a Thread: The Cumulative Impact of the Pandemic on Youth Who Have Been in Foster Care or Homeless”, May 2021, https://jbay.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Pandemic-Youth-Survey.pdf.
(3) Pivotal, July 14, 2021. “Bridging the Digital Divide.” https://www.pivotalnow.org/news/foster-care-system/the-digital-divide.
(4) Jennifer Rodriguez, “On the Threshold of Change - January 31, 2024 Webinar,” January 31,2024. https://youtu.be/qJLQh8HWv5M.