By Kimberly Phillips

Many young adults celebrate their 18^th and 21^st birthdays with presents and cake, but those in the foster care system might dread those milestones for the uncertainty they bring.

“One story that hits my heart is that of a young woman getting ready to turn 21 and age out of the foster care system in California,” says Nathanael Okpych, an associate professor in UConn’s School of Social Work. “She was getting close to finishing a two-year college degree, but her upcoming birthday meant that instead of focusing on classes and graduation, she was worrying about where to live and whether she’d have to have to drop of school.”

And hers is a so-called success story, Okpych says, because she navigated the college application process, classroom studies, homework loads, and advanced thinking without a familial support system to offer mental, emotional, and financial help.

If she failed, there was no place to fall.

“There are just so many barriers that prevent young people in foster care from reaching their dreams, especially those of getting into college and finishing college,” he says. “That’s where my research lies, trying to understand the factors that prevent them from graduating high school and getting into college and what we can do to help make that path smoother.”

Okpych, with colleague Jennifer M. Geiger from the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois Chicago, this summer received a Research Grant on Education from the Spencer Foundation for a new research study looking at data from 730 young adults in the California foster care system.

Those students were part of a past study that gathered information from them when they were 17, 19, 21, and 23 years old and sought permission to access even more data from the National Student Clearinghouse years into the future. This additional information will provide greater detail on things like which semesters they were enrolled in college and whether that yielded them a degree or certificate up to age 27.

“The purpose of this study is to determine the rates that young people in foster care go to college and earn a degree; are there disparities by race, gender, or sexual orientation; and what factors influenced their likelihood of finishing,” Okpych explains. “We’ll also look at aspects of their social support, education history, characteristics of the colleges they went to, how many were part-time versus full-time students.”

Another consideration of the study, he adds, is what financial support students received, including the federally funded, state-administered Education and Training Voucher, and whether receipt of the competitive funds influenced their educational path.

By next summer, Okpych says, he and Geiger will have presented their findings at conferences and written a handful of journal articles. But perhaps the most important outcome will be a short brief summarizing the study and its results that can be given to policymakers and others who can influence change.

“I don’t think students from the foster care system should have go to through Herculean efforts or have to be exceptionally bright or resilient to succeed,” he says. “What we need is to change systemic things to make their lives easier.”

He continues, “If that means offering housing during college breaks so they’re not homeless, let’s do it. If that means helping with daily living expenses, let’s do it. We need to change policies and help child welfare departments form a network of relationships for the young people in their care.”

Read more about Okpych’s work here.

UConn School of Social Work professor S. Megan Berthold has traveled around the world as far as Nepal to work with trauma survivors, but a yearlong academic Fulbright Canada Distinguished Research Chair Award at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, will put her only about 400 miles to the north of Hartford.

While that’s closer than the 8,700 miles away when she was on the Thai-Cambodian border, working on the edge of a war zone, her research in Canada will be no less important.
Starting in September, Berthold will serve as the Fulbright Canada Distinguished Research Chair in Public Affairs in North America: Society, Policy, Media, at Carleton University, 2024-2025.

The prestigious award will allow her to expand on a project that began in 2017 with two social work colleagues from UConn.

“This will be a great opportunity to dig deep into my research,” Berthold says. “I also welcome the opportunity to work in a new environment. Early in my career, I worked in a few refugee camps. I enjoy working cross culturally and gaining a different perspective on the issues I care about.”

Her Fulbright is the next phase of a qualitative study that includes social work professor Kathryn Libal, director of UConn’s Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, and associate professor Scott Harding, the School’s associate dean for academic affairs, along with several doctoral students.

Together, they’ve interviewed community sponsorship volunteers and health, mental health, and legal providers around the United States to learn about how they operate, where they excel, what challenges they face, and how community sponsorship could be strengthened.

“We originally conceived of this as a study that extends into Canada, because Canada is the global leader of these community sponsorship initiatives. Until now, we’ve had the capacity to do interviews only in the U.S.,” she says. “Fulbright Canada allows us to move our work into Canada.”

As a Fulbright Scholar, Berthold aims to determine best practices and strategies to overcome challenges faced by community sponsor groups in Canada that are supporting refugees as they resettle there. She says her work also seeks to identify whether there is effective trauma-informed coordination of care for sponsored refugees to meet their health and mental health needs and to explore in what ways the Canadian model might be applied in the U.S.

In 2015-16, she notes, many Canadians volunteered to help sponsor Syrian refugees during a time of intensive displacement from their country.

“There has been widespread support for refugees in Canada. The resettlement context in each country is unique. Canada has a very different health care system than the U.S., for example, so you can’t just replicate their exact model and expect it to work well in the U.S.,” Berthold says.

Part of her work over the next year also will include interviewing refugees who received services in Canada or were sponsored by a community group there; Libal and Harding will do the same in the U.S. That piece will add firsthand experience to their findings.

“I believe that there needs to be improvements to equip providers and volunteers with the skills to be more trauma-informed and more appropriately attend to the holistic health and social service needs of refugees and their families,” Berthold says. “Over the years, I’ve trained many professionals in that area, and I see there’s much room for improvement. That’s from my clinical experience, but I need to wait and see what our research says before drawing a conclusion.”

Berthold was a longtime mental health clinician and trauma specialist working with refugees and asylum seekers since the mid 1980s prior to joining UConn’s School of Social Work in 2011. From 1998 to 2011, she was a therapist, researcher, forensic psychosocial evaluator, and expert witness at the Program for Torture Victims in Los Angeles.

Her work has taken her to places including Nepal, Nicaragua, Thailand, and the Philippines, rural areas without running water and with cultures very different than her own.

“Those who study or are specialists in treating refugees and asylum seekers, including those who have experienced war trauma, torture, genocide, and other kinds of persecution, understand there really needs to be an in-depth and integrated approach to care. People deserve that and it’s their human right,” she says, adding, “They have a right to health. They have a right to have an adequate standard of living and to support themselves.”

She continues, “A lot of these people were fighting for democracy in their country, and they were persecuted as a result. Many of these refugees, albeit not all of them, were human rights defenders in their countries and that’s why they were targeted – because the powers that be in their country deemed them a threat.”

Read more about Berthold’s work.