Published March 20, 2023 16:10
In order to help former foster children and youth in care with the financial struggle of post-secondary education, Storwell Self Storage has created the Foster Children Bursary Program. The aim of the program is to provide foster children with additional resources and support that might otherwise be unavailable to them.
The annual bursary is for the amount of $2,000. Eligibility requirements and access to the application form can be found at: https://www.storwell.com/bursary-application
Foster children and youth in care are some of the most underrepresented groups when it comes to financial support for post-secondary education, with very few scholarships and bursaries targeted towards this specific demographic. This is despite the fact that there are over 60,000 children in foster care across Canada. In fact, Manitoba’s rate of children in care is among the highest in the whole world. The Manitoba Centre for Health found that foster children experience problems at school from a very early age. Children often come into the foster care system as a result of factors that make them more likely to have poor educational outcomes including poverty, chronic neglect, and exposure to violence. As children get older, the gap in education outcomes between those in care and the general population widens.
A 2015 paper by a researcher at the Université de Montréal, found that one in three children between the ages of 10 and 17 experienced multiple relocations after their initial placement in foster care. Children who have been removed from abusive or traumatic family situations are vulnerable and in need of stability. If a child experiences several relocations after their initial placement in care, it makes it incredibly difficult for them to focus on their studies and their performance is school suffers as a result.
Every time a youth moves, they lose four to six months of academic progress and then struggle to makeup the loss over time. These struggles with education are only made worse when foster children age out of care and no longer have access to the supports available to them through the child welfare system. The financial burden that comes along with post-secondary education is often too much for many former foster children to overcome. For every 1,000 youths in Canadian foster care, only eight go on to graduate with a postsecondary education.