Child welfare advocates are using May, National Foster Care Month, to kick off a year-round effort to raise awareness and garner support for children and families in the foster care system.

“We believe it’s time to build the awareness and the critical mass of support and understanding of the issue. That is the first step,” Ralph Bayard, senior director of the Office of Diversity at Casey Family Programs and a spokesman for National Foster Care Month, said in a statement. “If you look at our nation’s largest systems, be it juvenile justice, healthcare, education, child welfare and others, you will find that children and families of color are consistently the ones being most adversely affected. We have to make sure there is equity in these systems so that every child, regardless of race, has the best opportunity to achieve a good outcome in life.”

Black American children made up less than 15 percent of the overall child population in the 2000 Census but comprised 27 percent of the children who entered foster care in 2004 and represented 34 percent of children who remained in foster care at the end of that year.

Poverty, bias and difficulty in finding adoptive parents are among several factors that contribute to the higher proportion of black children who end up in foster care, according to a report released last year by the Government Accountability Office.

The report said that theories about racial disproportion in the child welfare system suggest that children of color are more likely to be poor or from single parent homes, which are considered risk factors for maltreatment; they come into contact more often with social services officials who are likely to report such mistreatment; biased assumptions likely spur social service employees to report children of color to child protective services, and children of color have less access to preventive services or conditions that promote permanent placement.

According to National Foster Care Month, however, research shows that there is no difference in the incidence of abuse and neglect by racial group; children of color comprise 60 percent of America's 513,000 children in foster care. And, once in the foster care system, children of color tend to receive fewer services, stay in care longer, and generally have worse outcomes than white children.

The organization also said that, in addition to being overrepresented, black children in foster care often struggle to maintain their cultural identity while living away from home, principally because there is a lack of foster and adoptive families and other caregivers in the black community.

Lyman Legters, director of the Seattle field office for Casey Family Programs and a leader of the King County Coalition on Disproportionality, told BlackAmericaWeb.com in an interview last year after the release of the GAO report that he hoped it would prompt government agencies to create more flexible ways to address the needs of children in foster care, especially adolescent children.

“What we’re trying to do internally over the next couple of years is redefining our approach to adolescent children in foster care, and we’re asking ourselves is adoption always the best option? When you have kinship adoption, some of these children don’t need to lose connections with their biological families,” noting that relatives, especially grandparents, often are unwilling to cut off biological parental rights to the children.

Casey Family Programs is the lead group among 17 child welfare organizations involved in the foster care awareness and education project. Casey, a leader on child welfare issues, has created a number of projects to assist people in foster care. It has assisted celebrities, including singer-songwriter-producer Kashif and actress Victoria Rowell -- former foster children themselves -- who have launched support programs for young people in the system.

NFL star Keith Bulluck has become a spokesman for the National Foster Parent Association. Rowell, who has written "The Women Who Raised Me," a book about her experiences in the foster care system, has a foundation that raises money to expose foster children to the arts and support their education. She is also a spokeswoman for the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Casey Family Services. Kashif took a year off from work to launch iCARE, a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve the quality of life for children in foster care.

Casey Family Programs also tracked foster care alumni for its National Alumni Study, in which a large percentage of alumni expressed a desire to help others who were in the foster care. Follow-up efforts led to the founding of Foster Care Alumni of America, an organization founded in 2004 that aims to provide a supportive community for people who have been through foster care, as well as opportunities to work together with allies to improve policies and practices that affect those in the system.

For details about activities for National Foster Care Month, click here or call 1-888-799-KIDS.