Mar. 14—For young adults exiting the foster care system, the first step into adulthood may send them stumbling into a bottomless pit.

Media reports and studies indicate many of them struggle to find a place to live, a job and access to food and college. It’s like “the floor dropped out from under you,” said Sen. Michael Padilla, D-Albuquerque, who spent about 14 years living in seven different foster homes in his youth.

Ensuring there is solid flooring in place to help these young folks is the reason Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham gave for signing an executive order on Thursday expanding eligibility for a transition program that serves youths ages 18 to 21 who have aged out of the foster system.

The governor said during a news conference at the state Capitol the order is “an effort to ensure you don’t age out of foster care” without continued support into the adult world.

The order now allows people who were in foster programs in other states who live in New Mexico to be eligible to take advantage of the program. It also covers foster youth whose cases may not be fully adjudicated by the age of 18.

All told, that will impact between 15 and 20 young adults a year, Padilla said during the news conference.

Neera Tanden a domestic policy advisor to President Joe Biden, and Teresa Casados, Cabinet secretary of the state Children, Youth and Families Department, joined Padilla and Lujan Grisham for the signing ceremony.

CYFD launched the Fostering Connections program in 2020 to help young adults with such resources as housing, behavioral health support, job assistance and food access after they leave their foster families. Padilla helped spearhead efforts to create that program via legislation in 2019.

Since its inception, the program has helped about 300 young adults who were in the foster care system until they turned 18, Casados said. Currently almost 90 New Mexicans are enrolled in the program, she said, which is not mandatory.

Those in the program have case workers, or advocates, as Lujan Grisham called them, to connect with foster youth leaving the system and build new connections for them as independent-living adults.

Casados said that setup includes advocacy “reach-out” efforts to ensure those young adults are accessing services that will help stabilize their situation and prevent them from becoming homeless.

Padilla, who called his experience in the foster system of the 1970s and 1980s “painful,” said the executive order “provides a softer landing into adulthood.”

A similar program exists on the federal level, Tanden said. She said the Biden administration wants to invest “billions” into the country’s child welfare system in his fiscal year 2025 budget proposal. Included in that plan is “a guaranteed housing voucher for the 20,000 children existing the foster system,” Tanden said.

She called New Mexico’s Fostering Connections program a “model” for the rest of the country to consider when developing similar initiatives.

Yázh Pending, who is Diné and Jicarilla Apache and who said he aged out of the Fostering Connections program at 21 late last year, said at the event that without the support of the program “I wouldn’t have found a place to live, find employment, write a resume.”

He said it’s vital to maintain and expand the initiative to help others like him “who might need more direction in life.”

Though the conference was focused on the Fostering Connections program, Casados said during the briefing her agency is continuing to make “steady progress” reducing a jolting backlog of over 2,000 reports of alleged abuse and neglect.

That backlog, reported in January as being over 2,000, is down to around 1,300 now, she said.

Lujan Grisham said with the help of additional investigators from other state agencies, including the Regulation and Licensing Department, the state will “clear that backlog” soon.

“We have to never fall behind” with those cases again, she said.