Soul Care

Project Background

Young people with experience in foster care, who are primarily black and brown people of color, often experience complex trauma prior to entering foster care, while in care, and when transitioning out of care—yet many cannot access the type of culturally responsive, long-term mental health and wellness support they desire.

Existing systems and providers often struggle to meet the unique needs of these young people. Treatment relationships frequently end prematurely, before youth are able to experience the full benefit of mental health and wellness care. Providers offering culturally relevant care also struggle to scale their operations to meet the scale of need.

Knowing that foster youth need care more than ever, the New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), the Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health (OCMH), the Center for Fair Futures, Foster Youth Impact (FYI), and the Public Policy Lab (PPL) are launching an innovative collaboration to improve mental health outcomes for foster care youth. This project will receive overall coordination support from New Yorkers for Children.

Foster youth informed the project scope and will be a guiding voice throughout research, design, and implementation. Foster youth will continue to share their challenges around accessing services, engage in co-design sessions to ideate design concepts that address these barriers, and engage in the process of piloting and implementing the resulting products.

Young people in foster care engaged

Support staff engaged

What We're Researching

Participant Sample
We engaged 143 participants representing an array of roles and experiences within the foster care system and mental health services landscape in New York City, including: youth in foster care, mental health and wellness service providers, foster care agency staff, foster parents/family, and subject-matter experts.

Research Approach
Our research used a mixed-methods approach, combining primary research methods–a discovery survey, diary study, and semi-structured interviews–with secondary research. This combination of methods allowed us to capture diverse perspectives, understand the context of participants’ experiences, and generate actionable insights to inform the design of programs, tools, and communications aimed at improving mental health outcomes for youth in foster care.

Research Approach

Our research used a mixed-methods approach, combining primary research methods–a discovery survey, diary study, and semi-structured interviews–with secondary research.

Survey Through a youth-facing discovery survey, we asked questions about what services young people are interested in and what it’s like to try to find those services. The survey served as both a recruitment tool for us to invite a filtered set of youth to participate in subsequent research activities, and as a research tool to identify patterns and trends in youths’ mental health and wellness needs.

Diary Study Youth participants completed self-guided creative activities and reflections such as self-portraits imagining their “best selves” and vlogs depicting the spaces that ground them. The study uncovered nuanced insights that may not have emerged through other research methods, giving us a deeper look into participants’ daily routines, needs, and challenges. It also gave participants an opportunity to express themselves creatively while reflecting on the activities in private, on their own time.

Semi-Structured Interviews While the discovery survey and diary study were specific to youth, we used semi-structured interviews for all participant types, including mental health and wellness service providers, foster care agency staff, foster parents/family members, and subject-matter experts.

We aim to employ trauma-responsive practices in all of our interviews, but we adopted a specific trauma-responsive protocol for the fifteen interviews we conducted with youth. This protocol included allocating extra time to review the consent form, reminding youth that they could skip any questions or stop the interview at any time, acknowledging and validating youths’ feelings, and offering options of support if youth became distressed at any point during the interview. For youth under 18 years old, we secured consent from both the participant and their guardian and included an advocate for minors during interviews to make sure the youth felt comfortable throughout the interview.

What We Heard

"When I was 7 or 8, my case planners would change like every other month, every two to three weeks […] I loved that woman. I had seen her for a couple of months, and then she was gone.”

“One of the biggest struggles has been pushing for legitimacy. People who are not of hip hop or don’t identify with its cultural elements, there’s a stigma that can be very hard to push up against when working within systems."

“For me, they have to make therapy not feel like therapy.”

"It's hard to document the impact of my work with any kind of concrete metrics, but I need to figure something out because I need to be able to "prove" my program to funders. It's not as easy as quantifying a student's math progress."

“I think the most important thing is access. People have to wait so long to get services. Problems that could be hills become mountains."

“There’s obviously a big gap in relatability between the youth and the people providing services, and a lot of the therapeutic approaches we use today are based in Eurocentric ideology, so we know that it’s not necessarily meant for us folks of color.”

“Asking the foster parents what would help is a lot more helpful than the agency deciding this kid needs therapy, right? A foster parent might say, ‘actually, I think what this kid needs is music lessons or just something fun to do every week.’”

Service Landscape
The 103 youth who responded to the survey indicated the types of wellness activities they have tried and rated how impactful they believe each activity is in improving their mental health and wellbeing.

According to youth, participating in the arts and individual exercise are the two most impactful activities. Talking to a therapist is the most commonly tried activity but received a slightly lower impact score than other activities.

During interviews, young people expressed that they don’t always feel understood by their therapy provider and can find it difficult to open up in the therapy environment. They also had concerns about confidentiality when working with an agency-provided therapist. These are all factors that impact the therapy experience.

When asked about activities they would want to participate in but have not yet tried, many youth identified an interest in boxing/martial arts and individual exercise. Factors this project is seeking to address (cost, awareness, and access) received 48 responses, whereas other factors (such as not having time or general uncertainty) received 32 responses. This suggests that directing youth to these services would likely result in high engagement rates.

What We Designed

After synthesizing our research insights, we identified five key needs of young people in foster care:

choice, agency, and dignity in their mental health journeys;
consistent relationships with culturally competent care providers who can relate to their experiences;
peer support from other young people facing similar life situations; access to wellness activities and earlier interventions before escalation to
psychiatric services and medications; and
support developing skills in self-reflection, communication, and emotional regulation.

Based on these learnings, we collaborated directly with young people and the people who support them to develop design concepts to address these needs. During co-design sessions, we role-played coaching sessions with youth using preliminary conversation guides, facilitated workshops with providers to help them determine their goals and needs for forming a collective, and tested a variety of tools. After twelve co-design sessions with youth in foster care, agency staff, and providers, we finalized the tools to be pilot-ready.

Soul Care Program

The Soul Care Youth Program is a support initiative designed to guide young people in understanding, identifying, and reaching their therapeutic and wellness goals. With the support of a youth coach, they will receive personalized guidance and connection to resources and services. The program also provides training and support to the youth coaches. The program will be piloted by the Center for Fair Futures beginning in 2024, and will be redesigned by Public Policy Lab and scaled citywide by the NYC Administration for Children’s Services in 2026.

The Soul Care Program will focus on increasing youth’s awareness of, access to, and choice in mental health care and resources. With the accompaniment of their Fair Futures coaches, youth will receive tailored exploration and planning around their well-being goals, gain valuable life skills, and connect with a range of holistic wellness activities.

The Soul Care Program encompasses many different elements. The Soul Care Solar System (left) provides a framework for thinking through different aspects of well-being. The journey map (right) shows the experience of a typical young person in the Soul Care program over several months.

The Soul Care Program comprises seven different program elements:

Soul Care Guide to Holistic Well-Being A framework that helps youth explore the dimensions of life that contribute to holistic mental health and wellness. Coaches can use the booklet as an educational tool and reference material when working with youth on their unique wellness journeys.
Assisted Well-Being Planning for Youth Interactive planning tools that empower youth to take charge of their own wellness journeys. Completed with support from their Fair Futures coach, the worksheets help youth reflect on, document, and work toward their own needs and goals.
Structured Check-Ins & Guidance from Coaches Regular check-ins between coaches and youth about mental health, built into existing meeting cadences. Fair Futures Coaches will receive additional trainings and physical conversation guides to assist them in facilitating these conversations.
Well-Being Services and Activities Streamlined access to a variety of no-cost mental health and wellness services for youth, facilitated through new partnerships with local providers.
Agency-Based Group Experiences Extra funding for foster care agencies to host wellness-centered group experiences. Agencies will have flexibility in the type of programming they choose to run, ensuring programming is relevant and engaging for those who will participate.
Coach Training Materials Training materials to orient Fair Futures Coaches to the Soul Care program and train them on effectively facilitating the program. Training materials include a three-part hands-on training session, bi-weekly peer support groups for coaches facilitated by a family therapist, and a community WhatsApp group for in-the-moment support.
Centralized Resource Hub A centralized resource hub for Fair Futures Coaches to house all Soul Care Program components. In the hub, coaches will have access to all of the above tools, as well as additional resources including therapy referral practices, available supplies, commonly cited books/podcasts/tests, and recommended classes and support groups.

NYC Youth Wellness Collective

The NYC Youth Wellness Collective is a group of mental health and wellness providers providing alternative approaches to therapeutic healing for young people in foster care in New York City, as well as other underprivileged youth. The collective leverages arts, music, sports, and holistic activities to champion personal development through soul care.

The Collective’s purpose is to serve as culturally competent providers and advocates to expose more youth in foster care to alternative forms of therapy to help them better regulate and care for themselves. The Collective, with the support of an external consultant, will support each other in achieving sustainable business models. By bringing together a core group of local providers who already have big impacts on the youth in their communities, the collective aims to connect community-based practitioners, support them in business growth, and ultimately increase youth’s options when looking for culturally relevant, community-based well-being services.

Public Policy Lab worked with our partners at Fair Futures NY, Foster Youth Impact, and The Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health, to identify and bring together a core group of providers who could champion this work and move it forward. During the pilot, Fair Futures NY and Foster Youth Impact will take the wheel and continue to grow the collective while PPL and other project partners provide support for their organization’s growth and operating expenses, training, and promotion.

Core Providers include:

Raquel Harris, founder of Ring of Hope (Kickboxing)
Melody Centeno, founder of Foster Care Unplugged (Performance-Based Practice Therapy)
Jason Acosta, Social Worker (Hip-Hop Therapy)
Demetrius Napolitano, founder of Fostering Meditation (Yoga and Meditation)
Nolan Hanson, founder of Trans Boxing (Boxing)

Project Implementation

The above program and tools are currently being piloted. The pilot is being carried out across five foster care agencies that serve approximately 900 youth across New York City. Fair Futures Coaches at these agencies are being trained on and onboarded to the Soul Care Program. They will then carry out the program with participating youth over the course of 21 months.

The pilot will be evaluated, redesigned, and—if funding can be secured—expanded to all foster care agencies that work with the Fair Futures program.

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Soul Care

Partners & Funders

The Project

The Outcome

Project Background

What We're Researching

What We Heard

What We Designed

Project Implementation

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Projects

Soul Care

Partners & Funders

The Project

The Outcome

Soul Care

Partners & Funders

The Project

The Outcome

Project Background

What We're Researching

What We Heard

What We Designed

Project Implementation

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Get in Touch

Interested in partnering with us?

Join Us

We're currently seeking applications for a Graduate Summer Intern. If interested, learn more about the role here. To hear about future job announcements, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Threads, and LinkedIn or subscribe to our newsletter.

Follow Along

Social Media

Donate

We're currently seeking applications for a Graduate Summer Intern. If interested, learn more about the role here.

To hear about future job announcements, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Threads, and LinkedIn or subscribe to our newsletter.