Supporting queer youth in the child welfare system

The challenge

Queer children and youth in the child welfare system face higher risks of abuse, rejection, discrimination, and poor health. They are overrepresented in foster care, more likely to experience placement instability, and are more likely to age out into homelessness.

Proposed state legislation across the country reveals a polarized landscape around queer rights and safety. As of July 2025, the ACLU has tracked 598 bills that negatively impact LGBTQ rights, particularly for queer youth. These proposed bills cause harm regardless of whether they are ultimately passed into law, and the process by which they are formalized differs from state to state. Executive administrations have varied on the need to gather data on sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression (SOGIE), making it harder to know what’s really going on.

In July 2024, a federal rule was published to make sure that queer youth in foster care receive safe, affirming, and appropriate placements that support their needs. The rule requires a way for youth to request placements and report concerns. While this requirement is a step forward, the vague language doesn’t make it clear how foster care agencies are supposed to make sure queer youth are safe. It also still puts the onus on queer youth to disclose their identities and report concerns, when such standards of safety and well-being should be consistently applied.

Marina Nitze of the Child Welfare Playbook hired Bloom Works to conduct discovery research to provide recommendations for child welfare agencies across the country who want to support queer youth and improve outcomes.

The Child Welfare Playbook brings together staff from public and private agencies in all 50 U.S. states, all 6 territories, and most tribes.

The project

We interviewed subject matter experts from community organizations and nonprofits who support queer rights. We also sought and interviewed agency staff who work with queer youth, families who took in queer youth, and queer foster youth who are or were in foster care. These were our research goals:

• Identify how to improve outcomes for queer children and youth in the child welfare system
• Determine best practices for child welfare staff to better ensure safety of queer children and youth
• Uncover how to better find, recruit, develop, and retain resource families that help queer children and youth thrive

We started by conducting general and wide-ranging research on the needs of queer children. We then collected data directly from more than 51 people, including these participants:

• 10 subject-matter experts, including 7 policy and legal advocates and 3 queer education experts
• 11 public agency staff
• 13 private agency staff
• 10 resource families, also known as foster families
• 7 queer youth formerly in care

Given the controversial nature of the topic, some child welfare agencies were unwilling to participate, some even after agreeing to work with us in the past. We stayed nimble and pivoted to yield meaningful results.

We centered youth voices and experiences in our methods and while generating our final recommendations.

The result

Our findings show that all families—birth families, kinship caregivers, and foster parents—need support with affirming queer kids in care.

We found that agencies varied widely in their capacity to meet the needs of queer children and youth in care.

Our research suggested that there are 6 main facets that influence how supported queer youth feel.

Youth in child welfare settings are more supported when:

1. Leadership prioritizes queer affirmation and develops affirming policies
2. Staff capacity includes understanding sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression and familiarity with queer affirmation
3. A growth mindset prioritizes ongoing learning and resilience for the organization
4. Data systems include infrastructure for recognizing, recording and tracking sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression (or SOGIE) data
5. Resource families are prepared and supported to be affirming
6. Services and programs consistently affirm and are widely accessible for queer children and youth, families of origin, kin, and resource families

To help agencies better support queer kids, we created 2 deliverables:

• Affirming Resource Family Personae, which assists agency recruitment by expanding perceptions of who might be a promising candidate for a resource family (also known as a foster family) while highlighting the kinds of support different families will need to be queer affirming.
• Queer Affirmation Maturity Model, which provides a foundation for agencies to identify their specific growth areas across the 6 pillars.

Seven subject matter experts reviewed a draft of the Queer Affirmation Maturity Model. In addition to their helpful feedback to enhance the model, they overwhelmingly endorsed the tool.

On April 30, 2024, the same day that the federal rule designating appropriate placement for LGBTQIA2S+ youth in child welfare was finalized, we held a demo and workshop of the Maturity Model with members of the Child Welfare Playbook working group.

Attendees worked in small groups to review the model together, locate their respective organizations’ growth areas, and discuss ways to work with our recommendations and linked resources. The feedback was largely enthusiastic, with many expressing gratitude for the model serving as a jumping off point to grow their queer affirmation efforts agency-wide.

Media coverage

The project’s 2 senior UX researchers, Holly Harridan and Shelly Ronen, appeared on the Creating a Family Podcast in 2024 to discuss the needs of queer youth in the foster care system.

Go to their episode: Raising a LGBTQ+ Child or Youth.

This work is part of a broader portfolio of work in the child welfare space. Find more of our work with children and families here.