In the windowless D.C. Council hearing room, the college freshman took a breath before trying to explain how much pressure she felt as a foster youth nearing adulthood.
Marea was 18, three years from aging out of the foster care system and living on her own. If she wanted support, she had three options, but none of them felt right. She could seek adoption, but that would mean severing legal ties to her mother and younger brother forever. Guardianship would be temporary, lasting only until her 21st birthday. And as much as she loved her mother, she knew she could not return to live with her.
Now Marea — who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition her full name not be used because she is still in care — was confronting what had started to feel more and more likely: that she would end up aging out alone at age 21, without the support system or safety net many young adults take for granted.
“I know that I will never really be able to find that relationship that I have with my mother, or that I’m supposed to have with my mother, with my foster parent,” or with anyone else, Marea told lawmakers at a hearing in November. “So I just don’t know.”
Marea’s situation is familiar to thousands of foster teens around the country. Every year, about 15,000 to 20,000 young people nationally exit the foster care system without being adopted, finding a legal guardian or reuniting with their biological family, according to federal data. The consequences can be dire. Young people who age out are more likely to experience housing instability, end up incarcerated and struggle to attain employment or become a parent at a young age, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to improve the child welfare system.
Marea and four former foster youths sitting beside her had come to D.C.’s city hall to offer a solution.
Over the past two years, they and about two dozen other young people — all of whom had grown up in a system in which almost every important life decision was made by a government agency — worked to draft legislation that would allow them to redefine the meaning of family.
The legislation, called the Soul Act — for Support, Opportunity, Unity and Legal Relationships — is part of a burgeoning national movement to transform the foster care system by allowing older teens to create a legally binding network of support. Without having to sever legal ties to birth parents, they could choose their own family by drawing on a variety of guardians, blood relatives and other trusted adults — teachers, pastors, family friends — who agree to care for the young person in specific ways.
Kansas became the first state to pass such legislation in 2024, and in its first year 40 “Soul families” were approved. As numerous other states explore the concept, D.C. could become the second jurisdiction to adopt it if the bill passes this spring and lawmakers fund it in the budget. It’s expected to receive initial consideration Tuesday.
“One of the beautiful things about Soul is it opens up a much broader, more dynamic vision of what a family is,” said Tami Weerasingha-Cote, policy director at Children’s Law Center, which helped the D.C. teens and young adults craft the legislation.
For instance, a basketball coach or other mentor figure could provide advice on jobs and college or help pay for clothing or car repairs, responsibilities that under normal circumstances would fall to a parent. A designated main caregiver would provide housing and basic needs.
The need for an alternative path out of foster care is particularly acute in D.C., where about 16 percent of foster youths age out of the system without permanent family support — a rate twice the national average. Ann Reilly, a deputy director at the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA), said that is in part because Black and Brown children, who make up 95 percent of foster care cases in the District, age out at disproportionately higher rates than White children, whofederal data show are more likely to be adopted across all age groups.
Marea entered foster care at 15, an age when the idea of finding “new parents” becomes more difficult for teens in the welfare system. Her mother had failed for months to enroll her in high school, tipping off authorities to other issues at home. She wanted to keep her mother in her life as much as she legally could, she said — something Soul would allow.
“Over the last year I felt like I had a lot of pressure on me, because I felt as if I had to make a decision,” Marea said of her slate of imperfect options. “And I didn’t want to make the wrong decision.”
‘Not doing right by young people’
Over the past quarter-century, changes in child welfare have brought down the population of children entering foster care nationally, but the rate of older youths exiting on their own has barely budged, according to federal data.
“It’s pretty well accepted out in the field that that is not OK, and we are not doing right by young people,” said Leslie Gross, director of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Family Well-Being Strategy Group.
In 2017, the foundation convened a group of former foster youths from across the country to study the problem. They were asked to look for trends in data, and draw on their own experiences to understand why the foster care system was failing these young people. The problem, said Patty Chin, one of the former foster kids tapped by the foundation, was not with the existing options, which worked for thousands of children every year. But they weren’t always viable for older foster children. “And so that started a series of conversations: What if there was ever a fourth legal permanency option?” Chin said.
Out of that question grew Soul, and in 2020, the group presented the new framework at a child welfare conference. In the audience, D.C.’s Reilly was listening.
There were several common threads the group said Soul was intended to address.
Young people were rarely in the driver’s seat steering their own futures — welfare agencies made those decisions. Only the foster child could choose the Soul family path under the legislation.
They wanted to find a way to keep foster children more connected to their biological families — if it was something the child wanted — while at the same time making room for the foster child to bring “chosen family” into their support network legally.
And lastly, they knew there was a financial incentive. Many foster teens chose to age out to take advantage of state or federal money — such as a tuition assistance or savings program — that they could not access if they were adopted or had a guardian. Under Soul, teens would not have to choose between family or benefits. They could have both.
Reilly, a former social worker and 17-year veteran of D.C.’s child welfare system, was all too familiar with the shortcomings of the existing options for older youths. She remembered young adults who showed back up on her agency’s doorstep after they turned 21, because their guardian had kicked them out of the house. And while CFSA provides limited assistance for young people who age out, she saw how many of them struggled with the basics of adulthood, such as signing up for health benefits or paying rent.
“What we know is your brain’s not even fully developed until you’re 26 years old,” she said, citing research in brain science. “And so the idea that we are sending these youth who have experienced trauma, who are not living in a family setting, out in the world on their 21st birthday thinking they’re going to figure it out feels irrational.”
Reilly told the Casey Foundation that the D.C. government was interested in developing Soul. That was great, the foundation said. But if D.C. wanted to do it, Reilly remembers being told, the young people needed to be at the table.
‘I felt broken for a long time’
Justice Thurston, then the vice president of the youth advisory board for D.C.’s child services agency, was among the first foster youths Reilly and other agency leaders consulted in 2022. Thurston, then 20, had spent eight years in the system and was about to age out.
She was 12 the day child protection workers came to her D.C. home. The fridge was empty. Her mother had been struggling to provide for their basic needs, saddled with debt after trying to put Thurston’s older sibling through college.
In foster care, Justice was separated from her siblings as she bounced from home to home. In one place, she said, she was locked in her room almost an entire summer. At another, where she was reunited with her younger sister, she experienced relative stability for four years, and both girls signed papers to make their foster mother their legal guardian. Then the guardian stopped providing basic care — and they went back into the foster system.
“After that, I felt broken for a long time,” said Thurston. “And when I came back into care, I vowed to myself that I was going to fight for my rights, period, and help anybody I could.”
Hearing about Soul, Thurston said, she immediately thought of the people who could have been her Soul family: trusted teachers, a mentor, her aunt.
“I was, like, if I had a Soul family, my life would have turned out differently,” Thurston said. “And just being able to know that I’m a part of something that is gonna help the next generation after me has, like, really healed a deep part of me.”
To get started drafting the legislation, the Child and Family Services Agency held several “listening sessions” to hear from current and former foster youths about the ways they were let down by D.C.’s system. For some, it was difficult to return to CFSA’s office building. In these rooms they had had painful visitations with the parents who lost custody of them. It was here they had met with social workers they believed had failed them.
“When you walked through those hallways, …we had to take a breather,” said Princess Simms, who entered foster care at 16.
Simms had experienced abuse and neglect since the age of 5, she said. But it was not until she began running away, ending up in the juvenile justice system, that anyone seemed to pay attention.
She got pregnant in high school. No one in the welfare system explained prenatal care to her, and she miscarried, she said. Later, one foster parent frequently locked Simms out of the home, so she got a job — dancing at a strip club. On her 21st birthday she signed the papers to exit foster care immediately. She relied in part on an older boyfriend, a pimp she met at the club who took advantage of her naiveté. No social worker walked her through the government support available to young adults who age out, she said, and, despite having a rare genetic disorder called skeletal dysplasia, she went years without health insurance — the type of failures she was told never should have happened.
“It was really nice to be able to sit down in the room and say, ‘I’m not the only one that experienced this,’” Simms said.
At the end of the listening session, Simms said, she remembered asking what was next. Did the agency just want their feedback on whatever it later decided to do with Soul?
No, she was told. The agency wanted Simms and her peers to write the bill themselves.
‘Our voice actually had power’
Dayar Brown-Gurowitz, 32, the oldest of over 20 who agreed to work on the bill, co-chaired the legislative working group. He put to use his background as an administrative employee in the D.C. attorney general’s office, where he worked on youth programs for truancy and restorative justice.
Brown-Gurowitz had been in foster care from age 6, waiting for the right adoptive parent to come along. Over the course of 15 years he had over 30 placements — 30 different sets of rules and households and relationships — until he aged out at 21, he said. He had tried to reconnect with relatives, but none could pass a criminal-background check or fulfill CFSA’s requirements. He decided it would be better to age out on his own, relying on the limited benefits and services the agency provided, than to take a chance on adoption or guardianship.
Working on the legislation, he said, “it was the first time I saw that our voice actually had power and influence in the room, and that we were really looked at as experts.”
They debated every question, ranging from how old a youth had to be to petition a court for a Soul family to what requirements a Soul family member would have to fulfill to be approved. They decided, for example, to require the main caregiver to meet standards akin to a foster parent or guardian — but to loosen financial or background check restrictions for Soul family members in support roles.
They built in the concept of a “Soul coach,” an idea unique to D.C., in which a person with experience in foster care could help teens identify adults in their lives who could be Soul material.
And they meticulously outlined the rights and responsibilities that Soul family members would share: helping the young person make decisions about health care and education, like college prep; advising them on financial management; and providing transportation or even some spending money for new clothes. Marea worked on this issue when she joined in January 2025. Her Soul teammates thought she had exactly the chops they needed: Then a high school senior, Marea was on track to graduate as her school’s salutatorian, despite having started high school months late.
“Everything, every decision that we make, is based off of our own lives,” said Marea, now a nursing student at Catholic University.
In March of that year, they felt confident enough in their Soul proposal to pitch it to D.C. council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5), chairman of the youth affairs committee. Parker was the lawmaker they would need to persuade to sponsor the bill.
In his office, they took turns presenting the various components, as well as what they saw as the bill’s major financial benefits. A cost analysis found that it was about half as expensive to support a youth in Soul versus in a foster placement, a difference of about $21,000 annually per child, given that the agency anticipates fewer administrative, court and social work support costs for Soul families. They estimated about 40 young people per year could benefit from Soul, reducing the number who age out and the associated social costs.
Parker, a former teacher, was impressed by their work, he said. But he was most moved by their personal stories.
“I heard about how several of them didn’t feel as though they had the support to navigate the world once they aged out,” he said. “I heard about how some felt as though there was no hope for them to find a permanent place outside of the system because, as an older foster youth, nobody really wants you.
“I think of it as like a turning point in how I viewed the problem.”
A hard choice to make
This spring, as the legislation Parker sponsored wound its way through the D.C. Council, the clock kept ticking for Marea.
She had been thinking lately about what her Soul family would look like if the law were in place. She wasn’t a social butterfly, easily finding adult mentors as some of her peers had. She didn’t want to create a new family so much as preserve the one she had, something that had become harder from inside the foster system. Under Soul, she’d be able to have her mom and her grandfather, whom she called twice a week, be her supporters. She could keep her foster parent as a primary caregiver. She didn’t need more than that, she said.
But she knew she couldn’t count on Soul to help her. Even if the bill passes, even if the D.C. Council funds it during a year in which the mayor proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts, it would still have to go through a three-year implementation period.
She had kept her choice to herself for a while, knowing it was the very outcome that she and her peers had spent the past two years trying to prevent. She thought that maybe, a few years from now, far fewer would have to make the same one.
“I feel like I have to age out,” she said.
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