After turning 18, Wednesday Pope spent a year couch-surfing and living out of her car in Sacramento. The $960 per month she received from the state of California after aging out of foster care was not enough to pay rent, and she didn’t have a credit score or family to co-sign a lease.
Pope juggled a job at Starbucks, finding a place to live, and attending college. “It was all very difficult, and it should not have been that difficult,” says Pope, now 24.
She doesn’t want other young people in and out of foster care to go through the same experience. Over the past year, she teamed up with the nonprofit John Burton Advocates for Youth (JBAY) to share her story with legislators and call on the state to more adequately fund programs that support these highly vulnerable young people.
According to national data from the Annie E. Casey foundation, about 20,000 youth leave foster care each year, many left to navigate the transition into adulthood on their own. They face a higher risk of hardships like joblessness, homelessness, lower educational attainment, and mental health challenges compared with their peers.
Thanks to the work of the scrappy 20-year-old advocacy group, Californians who age out of foster care or experience homelessness as young adults have access to a variety of financial, housing, and educational supports, a safety net that experts say surpasses many other states around the country. JBAY has been instrumental in working with legislators to push for major policy changes like extending foster care from age 18 to 21, passing the nation’s first-ever foster youth tax credit, and helping a record number of youth succeed in college.
Advocates say the nonprofit has succeeded due to its commitment to elevate the voices of youth currently and formerly in foster care and to ensure that new laws are implemented effectively.
“Too often advocates declare victory when a law is passed,” says Mark Courtney, a University of Chicago social work professor whose research tracks outcomes for older foster youth. “Particularly when it comes to human services, you really have to be engaged around the implementation of the law.”
Political Acumen
JBAY was co-founded in 2004 by John Burton, a longtime California politician, and Amy Lemley, an expert in transition-age youth, child welfare, and the foster care system.
Lemley, now JBAY’s executive director, had co-founded First Place for Youth, a nonprofit that provides housing for those aging out of foster care. When a friend asked her to have lunch with Burton, then at the end of his term as president pro tempore of the California Senate, she told him about the need to draw on government funding to provide housing for youth leaving foster care.
At the time, foster care ended at age 18 for most. Few went on to post-secondary education and many experienced homelessness. “We really treated older young people in foster care as a total afterthought,” Lemley remembered telling Burton.
“He got it immediately,” she recalls. And they decided to join forces.
“I was a content expert, but he was the political expert in how you move an agenda, how you make things happen at the very most elite levels of political power,” she says. “It was a very fortunate combination.”
Burton’s long political career included stints in the California state Assembly and Senate. He twice chaired the state Democratic party and served a term in the U.S. House of Representatives, from which he resigned in 1982 after struggling with a cocaine addiction.
Burton had raised money to make grants to support youth organizations in the state, but Lemley made the case that his political skills and connections could make more of a difference than small philanthropic gifts.
Today, the organization has 10 full-time staff spread across the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Its youth advocacy program has been central to its work. Eight people with experience in the foster care system, including Wednesday Pope, sit on its Youth Advisory Board and receive a stipend along with training to write op-eds, provide expert testimony, and hold meetings with legislators.
About 80 percent of JBAY’s $4.6 million in revenue comes from grant makers, including the California Wellness, Stupski, Conrad N. Hilton, and Crankstart foundations, which each gave $500,000 in 2023. The remaining 20 percent comes from individual donors.
Policy Impacts
In 2008, JBAY helped lead the charge to expand federal funding, benefiting states that extend foster care support to age 21. The nonprofit pushed for extended care in California, and the state passed a law in 2010 that went into effect two years later.
Research has shown that extending support beyond age 18 makes a big difference, says Courtney, the University of Chicago professor who, as a visiting researcher, co-directs the Transition-Age Youth Research and Evaluation Hub at the University of California at Berkeley.
“There’s pretty strong evidence now that extending foster care increases the likelihood that young people will finish high school or equivalent GED and that they’ll enroll in college,” Courtney says. In addition, extended care reduces the likelihood of economic hardships and homelessness, and may help improve long term earnings.
“Overall, California is the most generous state in terms of the constellation of things that it provides for young people,” says Courtney, who has led the California Youth Transitions to Adulthood Study, which evaluates the impact of policy changes on young people in foster care.. JBAY has leaned on this data from Courtney in its advocacy efforts.
Since the state passed its law extending foster care in 2010, “I don’t know that there’s ever been a legislative session where there wasn’t some legislation targeting improving services for transitioning youth in California,” he says. “I don’t think that’s the case anywhere else.”
Other advocates agree that commitment is one of the JBAYs strengths.
Children’s Law Center of California provides legal representation for youth in the foster care system in Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Placer counties and also engages in policy advocacy, having cosponsored legislation with JBAY.
“Even if we have laws on our books that youth over 18 are entitled to housing, we still see a lot of youth in extended foster care facing housing instability,” says Sue Abrams, the nonprofit law firm’s deputy director. “JBAY doesn’t back down.”
JBAY, along with a coalition of groups focused on youth, have been advocating for more dollars for housing subsidies and a housing navigators program. That program, which helps current and former foster youth who receive a federal housing voucher secure and maintain housing, was slated to be eliminated from the latest California budget due to a multi-billion dollar deficit.
“We made this promise to foster youth that we would help them find independence and not be entirely alone,” says Pope. “Then we underfunded that promise.”
She helped fight for the preservation of the housing navigators program, ultimately securing $13.7 million in state funds for its continuation. And after two years of advocating for housing rate increases for older foster youths, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a budget in July that upped the individual rental subsidy by more than $1,000 each month.
Pope has seen state senators and assemblymembers moved by her testimony and says this latest victory has reinforced the power of sharing her story.
“As someone who felt kind of powerless and helpless to make changes in the world, JBAY has empowered me,” she says. “They see how valuable it is to include youth in the legislative process.”
Higher Education Collaboration
In addition to its advocacy on housing, JBAY also works to remove barriers to higher education.
“We really feel like that is the key step for these young people to have a trajectory of economic security and stability,” Lemley says. “Most young people going to college get the support of their parents, and these young people don’t have that.”
In the fall 2023 semester, a record 18,896 foster youth were enrolled in California community colleges, a 42 percent increase from a decade ago. But enrollment and graduation rates still lag behind the general population.
JBAY has worked alongside philanthropies to expand on pilot efforts that help young people access financial aid and other supportive services once they reach college.
Grant makers such as the Pritzker and Walter Johnson foundations had helped fund these hubs on college campuses where foster youth get assistance with their academic studies, applying for financial aid, securing books and food, and career mentoring, among other support.
A decade ago, JBAY took on the role of coordinating these funders through a donor collaborative called the California College Pathways project. The goal was to learn from campus grantees and expand their programs with state funding, so that foster youth across the state could gain access to a broad range of support.
In 2014, JBAY sponsored legislation to establish the program, now called Next Up, on community colleges with $15 million in state funding. Since then, the efforts have ramped up to other public colleges and universities. In 2022, JBAY successfully advocated for California to expand its funding of the program to $50 million annually, with an additional $18 million allocated to campus support programs in the California State University and University of California systems.
A recent Urban Institute evaluation of Next Up found that 80 percent of students spoke positively about their experience with the program’s staff and services.
Looking ahead, Lemley says that advocates have a lot more to do to ensure that young people are college ready.
It won’t be easy, says Lemley, who will step down from her role in October. The work of educational case management has to be based on individual needs. She hopes that JBAY, alongside its coalition of advocates, will be able to start small, learn along the way, and help implement policy reform over time.
“That’s what we did on the post-secondary education side,” she says, “and in under 10 years we’ve fundamentally transformed it.”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
