Why “foster” is our lifelong claim 

May is Foster Care Awareness Month, a time when headlines focus on “foster youth” by centering stories of crisis, instability, and need. What those stories rarely capture is what I see every day: people who lived through the foster care system and emerged not simply as survivors, but as leaders, advocates, and community builders insisting on the right to define themselves on their own terms.

Across Minnesota, more and more people with lived experience in foster care are reclaiming a word for themselves: Foster.

I want to speak directly to Black communities about why that matters. If there is any community that understands the political, cultural, and deeply personal power of naming ourselves, it is ours. Black people have spent generations resisting labels imposed upon us while redefining ourselves in ways that reflect dignity and self-determination. From “Negro” to “African American” to “Black,” we have always understood that language is never neutral. Naming yourself is an act of agency. A refusal to allow systems or institutions to tell you who you are.

That is what is happening when people choose to identify as Fosters.

A Foster is someone who has experienced the foster care system and carries that lived experience as part of who they are. Not as a source of shame, and not as a temporary condition they “graduated” from at adulthood, but as one of the many experiences that shaped them. Just as military service shapes a veteran, foster care leaves an imprint that does not disappear because time has passed.

For Black communities, this conversation is not abstract. Black children are dramatically overrepresented in foster care, making up roughly one-quarter of children in the system. They spend longer periods in care and reunify with family at lower rates than their white peers. These disparities are connected to the same systems that over-police Black neighborhoods, underfund Black schools, and scrutinize Black parenting more harshly than white parenting. “Foster” is not somebody else’s identity. It belongs to our communities too.

I am many things. I am Black. I am queer. I am neurodivergent. I am a New Yorker with Nigerian and Egyptian roots. I am also a Foster. That “also” matters. It does not erase my other identities, it gives language to a formative experience that shaped the way I move through the world. We do not refer to ourselves as “former children” because childhood remains part of us. The same is true for being a Foster.

What keeps many people from embracing that identity is not the word itself, but the shame our society attaches to foster care. Too often, that shame is placed on young people and parents instead of on the systems that separated families and treated poverty as neglect rather than evidence of unmet need. Naming an experience does not trap someone inside it. In many ways, it creates the possibility for healing, connection, and collective power.

That is exactly what Fosters across Minnesota are doing right now… leading policy reform, shaping public narrative, and advancing solutions across housing, education, and justice. The principle is simple: nothing about Fosters without Fosters.

This Foster Care Awareness Month, I hope Black families and communities can see the Foster identity for what it truly is: not a stigma being preserved, but a stigma being dismantled. Not a label imposed by a system, but a name intentionally claimed by the people who lived through it.

Osahon Akpata-Tanious is the Executive Director of Foster Advocates, a Foster-led systems-change nonprofit in Minnesota.