2025 Foster America Annual Report

from the Field

When families are struggling—with money, housing, with the ordinary and extraordinary weight of raising children—they deserve compassion, connection, and help. What too many get instead is suspicion.

Foster America is built on the belief that this can change. As this annual report illustrates, 2025 brought meaningful evidence that it is.

Across the country, our coalition groups and learning cohorts took action, creating tangible new structures that are changing how systems respond to families. In Colorado, mandated reporters now have a pathway to connect families to support without triggering a child protection investigation. In South Carolina, parent peers who have navigated the system themselves are showing up for other families facing hardships—offering connection and tangible help. In Washington D.C., families experiencing homelessness can access intensive support without opening a child welfare case, using funding streams once focused on foster care placement. These aren’t silver bullet or stroke-of-the-pen solutions. They represent a deeper change in how communities are rethinking responsibility, dignity, and care. And they’re happening because of people. Dedicated humans making change inside and outside government. Leaders drawing on their lived experience. Changemakers exercising skills to influence and innovate. Coalitions whose members are aligning across their differing roles and perspectives, committed to building something different together. Nationally, this work is part of a broader movement. While foster care entries have declined substantially in recent years, the field still faces a critical constraint: the infrastructure required to prevent child protective involvement at scale. Communities need aligned funding. Families deserve clear, voluntary pathways to access support without threat. And leadership must stay grounded in lived experience, to translate families’ visions for themselves and their children into new approaches and practices. Entering our tenth year, I feel a grateful sense of awe at how far we’ve come. In equal measure, I hold a pressing urgency at how far there is to go, especially as mounting threats that could topple a decade of progress in reducing removals into foster care.

Families belong together. Our systems should reflect that.

— Marie Zemler Wu Co-Founder, Executive Director Foster America

I am grateful to the partners, funders, fellows, staff, and lived experts who fuel this transformative work. And I look forward to continuing to build what comes next—together.