Foster Care Training

This 3.5 hour training will educate providers about federal and California state laws that protect LGBTQ youth in care, as well as alert them to procedures for reporting anti-LGBTQ discrimination in educational, therapeutic, and child welfare contexts. Participants will review legal protections for youth in regards to placement, medical care, gender-affirming medical care and therapy, and access to sex-segregated spaces. Participants will learn procedures for how to support a client’s name and/or gender change, whether minor or adult, and how to do so when clients have a legal guardian other than a parent, or one or more parents still listed as guardians. Participants will also discuss how to make strategic choices to support name, gender, and pronoun changes among youth clients outside a court-ordered process (i.e. under AB1266.) Participants will participate in a group assessment regarding knowledge of these laws, learn procedures for filing various types of discrimination reports, and complete a case study in small groups. They will also consider what recourse a client at their agency (or other context) may have in reporting discrimination against a fellow provider and strategize about how to support such clients in advocacy.