Sarah Mountz is an assistant professor in the School of Social Welfare at UAlbany. Mountz's research focuses on the experiences of LGBTQ youth in child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and among homeless youth populations. This episode includes sound bites from the 2017 mini-documentary, "From Our Perspectives: Untold Stories of LGBTQ Youth in the Los Angeles Foster Care System," which features community-based, qualitative research by Mountz and Moshoula Capous-Desyllas of California State University Northridge. Watch the documentary: vimeo.com/220431684.
Sarah Mountz is an assistant professor in the School of Social Welfare at UAlbany. Her research focuses on the experiences of LGBTQ youth in child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and among homeless youth populations.
This episode includes sound bites from the 2017 mini-documentary, "From Our Perspectives: Untold Stories of LGBTQ Youth in the Los Angeles Foster Care System," which features community-based, qualitative research by Mountz and Moshoula Capous-Desyllas of California State University Northridge. Watch the documentary: https://vimeo.com/220431684.
Related paper: Mountz, S., Capous-Desyllas, M. and Pourciau, E. (2018). “Because we’re fighting to be ourselves:” voices from transgender and gender expansive former foster youth. Child Welfare, 96, 1, 103.
The UAlbany News Podcast is hosted and produced by Sarah O'Carroll, a Communications Specialist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, with production assistance by Patrick Dodson and Scott Freedman.
Have a comment or question about one of our episodes? You can email us at mediarelations@albany.edu, and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Welcome to the UAlbany news podcast. I'm your host Sarah O'Carroll. I have with me Sarah Mounts, an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Welfare. Her research focuses on the experiences of LGBTQ youth in child welfare and juvenile justice systems and among homeless youth populations.
Speaker 2:
Stigma that I felt held me back and made me like almost lie to myself and not want to believe certain aspects about myself.
Speaker 3:
You know, growing up in foster care, I grew up believing that I was different and that I couldn't do something. Still to this day I doubt myself, but I'm slowly beginning to believe that I'm not what others made me believe.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Well Sarah, thank you for being here on this chilly morning in Albany.
Sarah Mounts:
Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Now I want to talk about your recent project in Los Angeles, a bit more sunny place than here right now, but what got you interested in researching the experiences of youth and care who are transgender or gender expansive?
Sarah Mounts:
Sure. So that particular study looked at LGBTQ youth more generally and we did dis-aggregate some of the data that looked at the experiences of youth who are trans or gender expansive or non-binary. But what attracted me to that particular area is going way, way, way, way back. Having been a youth activist and a queer youth myself and having started one of the earlier gay straight alliances in the '90s at Poughkeepsie High School and then later becoming a social worker. While I was getting my master's in social work in New York city, there was a class action lawsuit brought against the city by a group of LGBTQ youth in foster care saying that they were being discriminated against, that they were being mistreated within foster families, within congregate care facilities and they actually won that class action lawsuit. Around the same time, an early body of research was produced by Gary Mallon looking at the experiences of LGBTQ youth in foster care in New York city. So as a result of all this, the city selected a few agencies to open LGBTQ congregate care facilities.
Sarah Mounts:
One of my MSW field placements was at one of those agencies at the time, it was called Saint Christopher [Ottoly 00:02:53]. They've since changed their name to SCO and they opened one of the early congregate care facilities for LGBTQ youth in New York city, and not a lot of cities have those. I was working at the time as a substance abuse prevention counselor and they later hired me to be a caseworker for those youth. So I had a lot of practice experience and intimacy with what the experiences of LGBTQ or queer and trans youth in the foster care system were. While I think that opening facilities specifically intended to affirm and support that community is an advance, I still saw that they were experiencing a lot of discrimination and harassment in the community and other systems of care.
Sarah Mounts:
So, eventually I became frustrated by my limitation to engage in structural or systemic change as a caseworker. So I decided to pursue research and advocacy related to research.
Sarah O'Carroll:
That's interesting. I've heard it actually the other way around of I really want to help people in tangible ways, but sometimes research has its own limits of how involved you can get in people's lives. But that sounds encouraging that you've been able to make a difference by research.
Sarah Mounts:
So definitely, I mean there are different types of research and different methodologies and I think the fact that I had been a practitioner and the fact that I had been a youth organizer definitely informed the way I wanted to go about doing my research. So I use participatory methods. The study we talked about in Los Angeles utilized something called Community Based Participatory Research Approach and photo voice methods. The intention is to really engage young people in an intimate way, in a relational way as stakeholders in the research process. So you can engage in research in a really distant way. That's not how I've chosen to go about it because of the way that I came into research.
Sarah O'Carroll:
No, you've got quite the history and working in these different outlets to make a difference. So that's really neat. Now, what are some of the key obstacles that youth in foster care face?
Sarah Mounts:
So I think youth in foster care in general face a lot of barriers and obstacles particularly. I'm looking right now at issues of educational access and educational justice, but in terms of LGBTQ youth specifically they ... some of the unique challenges that they face are caregiver and case worker bias or discrimination or mistreatment. They tend to have more placements while they're in the foster care system than their heterosexual and cisgender peers.
Sarah O'Carroll:
What do you mean by that?
Sarah Mounts:
Have more placements?
Sarah O'Carroll:
Yes.
Sarah Mounts:
So they will tend to be placed in more different settings and be moved around more times than youth who don't have an LGBTQ identity. They might for example, be in a foster family and experience a non affirming foster care giver or it may come to the attention of the foster parent that this is an LGBTQ youth and they may no longer want to have them in their home and then they may be moved to a congregate care facility or a group home. There was a study that came out of the Williams Institute in 2014 that LGBTQ youth and foster care are three times more likely to be hospitalized for emotional reasons. So the experiences that they have both in terms of their reasons for coming into foster care and their experiences of being LGBTQ and foster care may contribute to mental health struggles, which may land them in, for example, a residential treatment facility.
Sarah Mounts:
So they just tend to have ... That same Williams Institute study I just referenced, found that LGBTQ youth were twice as likely ... had twice as many placements and were twice as likely to be placed in a group home as opposed with a foster family than non LGBTQ youth.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Now going back to the Los Angeles project, what were some of your biggest questions going into it and perhaps some of your most meaningful takeaways?
Sarah Mounts:
Sure, so although there is a small body of research looking at LGBTQ youth in foster care, at that point there wasn't research looking at former foster youth who identify as LGBTQ. So we didn't know a lot about their experiences of aging out of foster care or transitioning out of foster care. So we're really interested in that. We also, the majority of research on LGBTQ youth in foster care tends to be quantitative or survey based.
Sarah Mounts:
So we really wanted to do research in a way that centered their voices, amplified their voices, and was participatory or engaged them as stakeholders in the research project. This was not something I did alone. So I collaborated with a colleague in the sociology department at Cal State Northridge, [Mishula Kapposdesoles 00:08:19], and some of our masters of social work students at the time who've gone on to become practitioners after graduating. We also had a community advisory board that informed the study that was made up of practitioners working with LGBTQ youth and systems and a couple of former foster youth who identify as LGBTQ.
Sarah O'Carroll:
[inaudible 00:08:45] Now how does that bridge into your work at UAlbany? It's something that it seems you're still continually working towards.
Sarah Mounts:
Yeah, so you asked me what some of the biggest takeaways were and some things that really stood out to me were the lack of support that youth expressed experiencing upon aging out of foster care. I think that this is probably experienced by a lot of foster youth regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity, but I think something unique for LGBTQ youth is that they may be less likely to have what we call permanency resources in their life. So ongoing connections to adults to help them navigate the transition out of the system and into adulthood because of things like family rejection or a foster parent or caregiver rejection, caseworker bias. So I think that uniquely shapes their experience of transitioning out of care.
Sarah Mounts:
So that was something that really stood out. These young people said they felt really unsupported transitioning out of the foster care system. Many of them had had periods of homelessness after aging out of foster care or housing insecurity, couch surfing, sleeping in cars, sleeping on trains, things like that. For trans and non-binary youth in particular, there may be particular medical needs that are being unmet. So, for example, if you're desiring to medically or physically transition and you want to access hormones, it can be hard to access those things, particularly having aged out of the system if you don't have health insurance. One of the things that really, really stuck with me was the significance of education and what a difference it made when youth had access to higher ed. So nationally only about 50% of youth who've been in the foster care system who've aged out of foster care have graduated from high school or secured a GED.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Wow.
Sarah Mounts:
Two to 7% of youth who've been in foster care graduate with a two or four year degree, which is to me an astounding injustice that this young population experiences. I came from California, which has an incredibly robust system, a campus based support system for youth who have been in foster care or are in foster care called the Guardian and Resilient Scholars Program. I got to New York and I started at SUNY and I expected that there might be something similar and there just wasn't. So, because that piece of the research really stuck with me so strongly, I decided to really focus on working with students at UAlbany who have a foster care background, to gather data about what their experiences have been and what their pro programmatic needs might be. So the School of Social Welfare and the Educational Opportunities Program, EOP, has been partnering for the last year to work with students within EOP who have a foster care background and they've been operating as co-researchers to design a study with me to collect data about UAlbany students with a foster care background.
Sarah Mounts:
There've been some really cool side projects or offshoots based on that research. So for example, the students who have been engaging as co-researchers wanted to start a foster youth club for students on campus with a foster care background and their allies. So we just submitted the paperwork with student activities to do that. It's really something unique within the SUNY system. We attended an advocacy day as a group at the Capitol. The Foster and Youth Success Alliance is a statewide advocacy group that advocates for enhanced funding and support for youth in New York state with a foster care background.
Sarah Mounts:
So some of the co-researchers and I and one of the EOP counselors attended that advocacy day at the Capitol. They're going to come speak a couple of times, the semester at the School Of Social Welfare, which is really powerful because they're going to be speaking directly to people who are going into the field of social work, many of whom will go into child welfare work and are going to be sharing their stories directly with those people in a way that I think can have a really profound impact. So there've been some really amazing byproducts of that work outside of just the research or collecting the data.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Very cool. I feel like I often ask what guidance you might have for others in the field, in the academic setting, and then about those who are directly involved in foster systems and yet it seems that you are already doing those things, but is there anything else that you'd want to speak to for those who are doing research?
Sarah Mounts:
Something that I've become really aware of from talking to the UAlbany students with a foster care background is how ill-equipped a lot of agencies and workers are to support them in the process of accessing college. So there are all kinds of barriers for youth in foster care at the K through 12 level. So for example, you know if you're moved around a lot of times you may be in a lot of different school settings or school districts and it may be hard to accumulate the credits you need to graduate, but then not having someone to guide you through the process of applying to college, not knowing what colleges to look at and not knowing how to go through the financial aid process, needing someone to take you on college campus visits, all of those things are unique experiences to youth with a foster care background.
Sarah Mounts:
Then for those young people who do make it to college, there are barriers to retention. So again, I think that there's ... that agencies and workers need to be better prepared to support current and former foster youth through both the process of application and navigating financial aid, but also once they get here. I think because so few youth historically have gone to college, that knowledge doesn't exist and that competency at the level that it should among agencies and workers. So they just don't, sometimes they don't expect a young person to go to college and so they don't, they haven't developed the skills to help them navigate that process.
Sarah Mounts:
Some of the stories I've been hearing are that my agency didn't support me. My case worker didn't support me. Now that I'm here, I don't hear from my agency. I have to navigate all this bureaucracy to get the support that I need. At the university level, I think that we can be doing more to just enhance visibility and responsiveness among lots of units and programs to this community of young people to create educational justice and better rates of graduation for youth in foster care.
Sarah O'Carroll:
That no one should be alone after graduating from a foster care facility and that you're not alone when you're looking into colleges. Then once you get there that there's a pathway from when someone's much younger to entering adulthood. There needs to be support it sounds like.
Sarah Mounts:
Yeah. So if you do end up going to college, you're probably going to age out of foster care while you're there. Then something I've also become increasingly aware of from talking to some of our own students at UAlbany is that they need support around aging out of foster care when they're in college. It's enough to navigate college as often a first generation student or not having a system of support, but then not having support around the aging out of foster care and not having a lot of a safety net. It's really, really challenging.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Well, it's been encouraging to hear all of the things that you've put in motion in just a year and a half of your time here. I look forward to seeing how these flourish and hopefully we can get the word out for others to know that there's resources available on campus.
Sarah Mounts:
Yeah, if I could just say if there are other students on campus who have a foster care background or who are allies or faculty or staff who know folks on campus, please have them reach out to me and I'm happy to connect them to the group that I've been working with. We'd love to grow our numbers. So thank you for the opportunity.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Absolutely. How can an ally be a better ally to this community? Can you share some advice or direction?
Sarah Mounts:
I think listening to folks when they talk about the experience of having been in foster care and creating and also it's, we have the internet, right? So there's all these opportunities to learn about what people's experiences have been and then using that information to create more affirming programming on campus. So, for example the financial aid office, knowing that youth with a foster care background may have exceptional needs and expenses beyond the traditional college student that go unmet because of a lack of support or safety net, the counseling center being really aware of some of the mental health struggles that may be unique to coming from a foster care background.
Sarah Mounts:
Faculty members knowing what some of the academic barriers may be or barriers to coursework for youth with a foster care background. Just kind of heightening education and awareness and visibility on campus so that we become a system, a university that's more responsive to this community and ideally as more supportive, promotes retention, and encourages other youth who may be in high school to attend college. So those are some of the ways I would recommend.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Thank you. Sarah, thank you so much for sharing your work and for being here this morning.
Sarah Mounts:
Thank you, Sarah.
Speaker 5:
Not always easy to be by ourselves, but we want to be the ones to show you that we can. We want to feel strong. We want to be strong. We want to succeed.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Thank you for listening to the UAlbany news podcast. I'm your host, Sarah O'Carroll and that was Sarah Mounts, an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Welfare. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by emailing us at mediarelations@albany.edu and you can find us on Twitter at UAlbany news.