Session: Supporting Students with Foster Care Experience to and through College: Practice-Based Research with the Embark Georgia Research Consortium (Society for Social Work and Research 31st Annual Conference)

Featuring work of the Embark Georgia Research Consortium (EGRC) — a practice-research partnership housed at the University of Georgia and committed to generating and disseminating evidence that improves outcomes for students experiencing foster care (SEFC) — this session shares five papers that collectively examine SEFC educational pathways at multiple points of intervention and through myriad methodological lenses. Together, they offer a theoretically grounded, analytically diverse account of what it takes to build and sustain the infrastructure of educational opportunity for this population.

The first paper explores the perceptions of SEFC who participated in a pre-collegiate summer program, centering their voices on belonging, relational support, and what it means to start building a college-going identity before ever arriving on campus. The second paper examines student participation in the federal Education and Training Voucher program (ETV; postsecondary funding for SEFC) and related factors associated with postsecondary access. The third paper offers an examination of how campus support programs prioritize and implement direct services for SEFC when given access to one-time capacity building funds. The fourth paper uses a Collective Impact (CI) framework to provide a blueprint for how intentional collaboration between higher education, child welfare systems, and other critical service organizations can build cohesive networks to provide comprehensive support for SEFC. Finally, the fifth paper uses ETV and National Student Clearinghouse data to assess the longitudinal impact of ETV funding on postsecondary persistence and graduation for SEFC.

These five papers are not merely thematically related; they are analytically interdependent. The pre-collegiate program paper highlights the relational and identity-based dimensions of postsecondary access for SEFC that quantitative data cannot fully capture — establishing the motivational context within which structural supports for SEFC must operate. The Collective Impact paper provides guidance for how to build meaningful collaborations that provide the foundation for dynamic, supportive postsecondary environments for SEFC. The mini-grant case study illuminates how institutions operationalize support and illustrates the variability in campus-level implementation that shapes whether interventions reach SEFC. The two longitudinal ETV analyses then track whether and how those supports translate into postsecondary enrollment and progress. Taken together, the papers reflect a practice-research-practice cycle central to EGRC's model: evidence generated across disciplines, interpreted with practitioners and lived experience voices, and returned to the programs and people who can affect policy change.

At a moment when federal support for SEFC in higher education faces uncertainty and states are increasingly asked to demonstrate return on investment of support programs, coordinated multi-method research of this kind is both timely and necessary. This symposium makes the case that closing the educational opportunity gap for SEFC requires groundwork that is concurrently structural, relational, and longitudinal.