Amanda Metivier and Les Gara: Foster Care in Alaska

Amanda Metivier is the director of the Alaska Child Welfare Academy at UAA and is a board member and co-founder of Facing Foster Care in Alaska. She and her husband are foster parents who have provided homes for many youth over the past 15 years – many of them teenagers since both Amanda and her husband were foster youth themselves and know the difficulty that older children face in finding a willing home.

Les Gara was the 2022 democratic candidate for governor of Alaska. He is a former legislator who served in the Alaska state house from 2003 to 2019. Throughout his time in the legislature he advocated for foster care reform and in 2018 achieved it with House Bill 151.

In spite of that landmark legislation, little has changed about our foster system. Alaska faces a severe shortage of  licensed foster care parents. To learn more about how to be a foster parent, click here.

LINKS:

Mother Jones article "Inside the Psychiatric Hospitals Where Foster Kids Are a 'Gold Mine'" by Julia Lurie.

New Yorker article "When Foster Parents Don't Want to Give Back the Baby" by Eli Hager.

HB 151 SUMMARY

HB 27 SUMMARY