Ampersand Families was formed in 2008 to help older youth and teens in foster care join safe, loving, permanent families through adoption.
Ampersand Families’ founding marked a significant shift in Minnesota’s child welfare system, changing perceptions of “unadoptable” older youth and reducing the number of youth “aging out” without support. Today, we continue to work alongside older foster youth (aged 10+) in Minnesota to find safe, permanent homes connected to their relatives, kin, community, and culture.
Ampersand Families’ mission is uniquely successful because we walk alongside youth, families, and communities who have been impacted by the child welfare system with a commitment to build and restore meaningful relationships while centering and upholding a youth’s whole identity. We help Fosters to thrive for a lifetime through high-impact youth support, innovative relative & kin search programs, equitable, proactive family licensing support, and youth-centered permanency support available for as long as they need.
Focused on finding and engaging relatives & kin who can safely care for or support a child or sibling group while they are away from their parents, we provide the missing connections to long-term support and advocate each Foster’s voice as they define their permanency journey. When relatives or kin are not an option for permanency, we carefully prepare non-relative adoptive families for the complex and critical role they will play. Through required cultural and identity affirming trainings, we ensure youth will thrive with their family after placement.
Ampersand provides the missing support and advocacy for Fosters to find supportive families and homes for a lifetime.
Through this work, we’ve helped hundreds of youth find amazing families and homes from all backgrounds.
Our History
Ampersand Families was founded in 2008 to fill the gap in existing adoption efforts. Teens who had been removed from their parents’ care had a slim chance of joining an adoptive family before aging out of foster care, because few programs existed to help bring teens to permanency. At the time, most programs for teens were developed to help them age out of care.
Ampersand Families emerged from the pioneering work of co-founders Michelle Chalmers and Jen Braun in The Homecoming Project.
From 2003 to 2008, Chalmers led the federally funded demonstration project that showed permanent families can be found for teenagers labeled “hard to place” in Minnesota’s child welfare system. Working with some of the state’s oldest and longest-waiting foster teens without a straightforward path to placement, the Homecoming Project succeeded in connecting 51% of the youth with permanent families. By contrast, only 24% of Minnesota teens awaiting adoption during this same time period would enter a family.
Read about The Homecoming Project and listen to the national, award-winning American RadioWorks documentary, Wanted: Parents, that followed Jen Braun and her work to bring a teen brother and sister into an adoptive family:
