History
Under One Sky (U1S) was founded in February 1994 when Founding/Executive Director, Diane Delafield, recognized a need to support older youth in foster care in North Carolina in their development and transition to adulthood. She spent six months conducting a statewide study researching the needs, issues, and challenges facing the North Carolina foster care system resulting in a comprehensive report for the Children’s Home Society of North Carolina (1995) and the launching of Campaigns for Kids (CFK) in 1996. During the next eight years, Campaigns for Kids became an award-winning initiative providing specialized adoption and foster care recruitment services to child welfare agencies statewide. This strength-based work brought the faces, voices, and stories of older youth in foster care into community awareness, resulting in new adoptions and collaborative partnerships.
Extensive assessment including interviews with hundreds of families and youth clearly indicated that recruitment was not enough. Adoptive placements often disrupted due to youths’ behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes. Adoptive parents were not prepared to cope. Both youth and families needed specialized services and support to ensure successful adoption. Youth needed a place to come together to share experiences with other youth in foster care and work through challenges that kept them from being adopted. The emotional needs of these youth were greater than the services available. They needed mentoring, skills building, emotional and behavioral support. Preliminary research revealed no existing program to address the problem. NC Kids Adoption and Foster Care Network became involved early on as a mentoring partner to Under One Sky to support the development and implementation of a program to address a critical unmet need for North Carolina’s children and youth.
As an adoptive parent of a teenager, Ms. Delafield envisioned a camp-based experiential learning and mentoring program for youth. In 2004, Under One Sky, as an educational non-profit in partnership with the Department of 4-H Youth Development of NC State University and county Departments of Social Services, initiated the development of a Camp for Youth in Foster Care that would serve the unique needs of youth in foster care and adoptive families. The first pilot Passages camp was held in 2004. By fall the same year, Under One Sky was one of six organizations in the country to receive a federal multi-year grant from the Administration for Children and Families to fund their innovative camp-based adoption recruitment program.
Since that time, fifty-one youth have participated an average of two years in Passages and more than a hundred families have participated in Under One Sky’s Village Adoption Connection recruitment events and related activities. We have expanded programming to support families who have adopted youth in our program while creating advocacy, mentoring, and community outreach programs to further enrich the lives of the youth enrolled in Passages.
Our goal is for each youth to leave our program with a community of support that includes at least one committed and consistent adult in his/her life, a sense of self-efficacy, and practical life skills to ensure a successful passage to adulthood.
Ongoing assessment and research substantiates the need for a comprehensive approach to achieving youth permanency and preparation for adulthood. To address these needs, Under One Sky has initiated the development of an intergenerational multicultural village that will offer the promise of permanency to older youth in foster care. Click here for more information about Under One Sky’s Village project.
