Foster Care Training

This 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. 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.