Horizons: The Foster Forward Toolkit

As a team called Foster Forward, we presented our Community Change Initiative (CCI) project for the Pioneer Leadership Program (PLP) at the Student Signature Work Showcase in May 2025. During this year-long project, we learned many things along the way. We learned the importance of effective teamwork and collaboration that was needed to make our project successful. Through crucial conversation techniques, like STATE: share your facts, tell your story, ask for others’ paths, talk tentatively, and encourage testing, we acknowledged our power and privilege compared to that of foster youth, which helped us protect foster youth's experiences and knowledge. After doing this, we connected with many stakeholders in the foster care community who shared their experience and opinions with us, which allowed us to create a project. With the use of our resources, we worked with our community partner, Hope & Home, to design an extensive informational booklet to provide to the foster kids in Denver. 

This booklet is named Horizons: The Foster Forward Toolkit. We spent months of dedication and hard work researching and compiling information to ensure the content in the booklet is accurate and extensive so that foster kids could easily read and fully understand the concepts to prepare them for the world after aging out of the foster care system. The booklet covered topics such as Jobs and Finances, Independent Living, Health and Safety, and Legal Information. Then, we gave the booklet to our community partner, Hope & Home. Afterward, we got feedback from individuals who have experienced the foster care system and those transitioning to see how they felt about the book and what they thought was most useful in the booklet. In general, the feedback was positive, with the booklet being helpful and easy to use. The majority felt that the Jobs and Finance section, along with the Independent Living section, were the most applicable to their lives. Through this project, we grew as a team because we became more adept at mediating discussions and maintaining efficient communication channels. The most important thing our team learned was how to establish relationships between ourselves and others who have similar goals and visions that make it possible to create lasting change in the world.