ABSTRACT
Natural Mentoring to Support the Establishment of Permanency for Youth in Foster Care: Former foster youth are at risk for negative outcomes during adulthood. One attempt at preventing these negative outcomes is to help foster youth develop lifelong connections with supportive adults. However, addressing the permanency needs of former foster youth is fraught with a number of challenges. This chapter provides the reader with information on adult outcomes of former foster youth. It provides information about existing legislation that attempts to help former foster youth overcome those challenges, with a focus on how these challenges relate to connecting youth with mentors in order to address their permanency needs, and offers some background on particularly relevant theoretical frameworks to inform such efforts. It concludes with concrete recommendations about what practitioners can do to address the challenges of mentoring foster youth at the micro-, mezzo-, and macro-levels.
