Virtual meeting with Director Hauck, thanks to Disability Rights Ohio

The OHIO YAB and ACTION Ohio are seeking to make child welfare more disability competent and vice-versa. We want foster care youth and adults with a foster care history to know who to contact, what the resources are, and how to navigate them.

Thanks to support from Disability Rights Ohio, we were able to participate in a virtual meeting with Director Hauck and her staff on Wednesday, May 16, 2022.

During the call, we mentioned that we would love to invite Director Hauck’s statewide leadership when it comes to establishing additional conduits for these two systems to coordinate with one another such as:

• Establishing a statewide team to focus on coordination of care for foster youth with disabilities 
• Developing ongoing cross-trainings that  include disability service providers and child welfare staff.

It’s important to note that: 

• Our “ask” is specific to foster care youth (not the broad term: “multi-systems” youth) 
• Because our population has specific needs, and current/former foster youth are eligible for specific resources. 
• We want to ensure that current and former foster youth, and their service providers, are aware of those resources, especially since many of them are time-limited.

Regine, Juliana and Laquita shared powerfully about: 

• The disconnect between systems, and the need to ensure better coordination between developmental disability systems and foster care systems. 
• The need for developmental disability service providers and agencies to have a better understanding of trauma and the unique needs of foster youth.
• Stable housing, and holding providers accountable for youth in care when involving a 30-day notice, and youth having to find somewhere to go.
• It is incredibly traumatizing to come from the foster care system, which bounces you around, and then experience housing stability afterwards.Not being able to access certain services because of different funding. 

• Challenges faced when it comes to:
• Delay in being diagnosed (i.e. with dyslexia) as a teen in foster care. Better communication between systems could make more timely identification possible.
• Being determined to be eligible for services within the developmental disabilities system including when childhood documentation is difficult to locate or no longer exists (i.e. records only having a 10 year retention period).
• Barriers in being able to access services within the developmental disabilities system

• How overwhelming it is as a former foster youth with no family support to:
• Face these issues personally
• Seek to provide care for a sibling, with no additional family support to rely upon

One commitment that ACTION Ohio can make is that our website includes pathfinders for various resources, and we would love to work with Disability Rights Ohio and members of Director Hauck's team to create one or more pathfinders to assist in navigation. 

It was wonderful to learn about the dedication that Director Hauck's team has to providing technical assistance as needed, and we would love to learn more, create infographics in order to be of support, and also have a contact person on her team to reach out to as needed for technical assistance and questions.