DETECTIVE JIMMY - Narrative - Foster Future Funds Act Hello everyone! I’m Detective Jimmy; my door is always open. As Lotta Moxi said, I do want to be your Mayor, but today is about you, the community, and the power you have with your signature to enact the Foster Future Funds Act, written by two young ladies from Voices of Foster Care that I want to draw your attention to: Little Jessie and Brown Viking, who will bless you with her testimony following this important announcement about the Foster Future Funds Act. [Spoken Word] The Foster Future Funds Act. Every year, America spends between forty thousand / and three hundred thousand dollars per child in foster care. Over a decade, a single child can generate / hundreds of thousands — even millions — in public expenditures. Yet when foster youth age out at eighteen, or twenty-one... they leave with nothing. No savings. No assets. No credit. No financial cushion. No generational wealth. And a fifty percent chance of homelessness within eighteen months. The system pays everyone around the child — agencies, contractors, group homes, evaluators — but the child receives zero. That is not a funding failure. It is a structural failure. The Foster Future Funds Act is designed to fix that. This act takes a simple, fiscally responsible step: It preserves five percent of existing federal foster care reimbursements and deposits that money into a protected account for the child. No new spending. No new taxes. No new bureaucracy. Just a reallocation of dollars already being spent in the child's name. Here is how it works: A federally administered account is created the moment a child enters foster care. It follows them across placements, counties, and states. Five percent of federal Title Four-E funds — about three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars per child per year — is deposited automatically. The money is invested in low-risk index funds, or a Roth IRA-style structure where it grows tax-free. Youth can access it between ages eighteen and twenty-six for housing, education, transportation, child care, medical needs, or starting a business. Anything unused rolls into a retirement account. The impact is profound. A child who spends ten years in care could leave with thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars contributed — closer to fifty thousand, with modest growth. If untouched... it becomes seventy-five thousand at age thirty. One hundred twenty thousand at forty. And well into six figures by retirement. A child who once left foster care with nothing / now leaves with wealth. This is not charity. It is equity. It is not a new cost. It is a smarter use of existing dollars. It is not a partisan idea. It is a practical one. The United States currently spends thirty billion dollars a year on foster care, and produces no assets for the youth themselves. The Foster Future Funds Act preserves just five percent of that spending and transforms it into long-term stability — reducing downstream costs in incarceration, homelessness, and emergency services. It is elegant. It is efficient. It is overdue. The ask is simple: Support the development and introduction of the Foster Future Funds Act — a policy that ensures every child who spends time in foster care leaves with a financial foundation, instead of a financial void. Five percent of thirty billion is one point five billion dollars. A rounding error for government. A life-changing difference for a child. This is the moment to shift foster care from consumption to investment — and to finally give these young people... the future they deserve. Now ain't that right, Wind Chimes? [Outro (The Ebenezer Choral Hook] [Spoken with cadence or backed by choir] No new taxes. [Choir] No New taxes No new debt. [Choir] No charity lament. Turn the case number into capital: give us our five percent! [Choir] Give us our five percent! [Choir] Voices of Foster Care—- Because we care [On a riser] Oh—Oh—OH, we care. [Hard Stop]
