The Listening and Led by Youth in Foster Care: Grief, Hope, and Transitions (L.Y.G.H.T.) program is a peer grief support group influenced by and developed for youth in foster care. Multiple research studies conducted with youth in foster care demonstrated that youth’s experiences of death and non-death losses are under acknowledged in the child welfare system.

Based on these findings, the L.Y.G.H.T. program was developed to create a trauma-informed and grief-informed program to support the needs of youth in foster care who are grieving.

L.Y.G.H.T. is a youth-led and youth-driven program facilitated by supportive adults. The program is facilitated by volunteers in the child welfare system who have successfully completed the L.Y.G.H.T. Facilitation training and is implemented at organizations in the youth’s local community.

Oversight and guidance of the L.Y.G.H.T. program is provided by Dougy Center program staff and on-site organizational clinical support staff.

Dougy Center’s L.Y.G.H.T. program promotes peer-based support for youth in foster care who are grieving, providing a supportive and non-stigmatizing place to offer and receive support.

L.Y.G.H.T. is especially important to youth in foster care who are grieving because:

• Grief is a natural response to loss of all kinds, adjusting to loss requires attention, and when it is buried or ignored, it may affect us in numerous physical, emotional, and social ways.
• For decades, research has produced the same findings: Youth in foster care are at greater risk for negative outcomes than are youth in the general population.
• Many of the commonly accepted protective factors which contribute to healthy development in adolescence are lacking for youth who have been in the foster care system, including the sense of safety, consistency, and self-efficacy.
• While the circumstances which lead to a youth needing to be removed from their home may vary, the undeniable fact is that their life has experienced a disruption which dominoes into multiple losses.