Ampersand Families

Each year in Minnesota, more than 11,000 kids experience out-of-home placement. Most of these kids will safely return home when their parents get the help they need. But some will spend years in foster care - some their entire childhoods. About 350 Minnesota teens age out of foster care each year with no legal family and no formal support system.

These precious young people are far more likely to experience homelessness, poverty, poor mental health, early pregnancy, incarceration, and other serious life challenges.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  

At Ampersand Families, we’re working upstream and downstream to get kids out of foster care and into safe, loving, permanent families and communities with an urgency that honors the brevity of childhood.

Chantal and A’Shayla, pictured above, are an Ampersand Family. A’shayla spent years in foster care, stuck in the system. Chantal, her grandma, desperately wanted to get her out. But she faced barriers in a complex and racialized system. Ampersand Families helped her overcome those barriers and bring A’shayla home.

“They do an exceptional job,” she says. “Without their help, I wouldn’t have been able to adopt my granddaughter.”  

We’re proud of the work we do to help kids in foster care find family, prioritizing relatives and kin whenever possible. 

Last year, we:

• Identified and engaged 100+ relatives and kin per child as a potential permanency resource for 43 “hard-to-place” older youth in foster care.
• Identified and engaged 100+ relatives and kin per child as a potential placement resource for kids of any age just entering the child welfare system.
• Celebrated 15 finalized adoptions of “hard-to-place” older youth into permanent families.
• Provided ongoing support and programming to kinship and adoptive families to help them build community, support each other, heal from trauma, and thrive.

Read more about our work and outcomes in our FY24 Annual report or on our website.  

Thank you for supporting this work!