OPINION: North Carolina’s foster care system is in crisis. It doesn’t have to be
Cardinal Pine
By Gaile Osborne
July 30, 2025
For the past 15 years, I’ve opened my home — and my heart — to more than 40 children in North Carolina’s foster care system.
I’ve welcomed toddlers still trembling from trauma. I’ve celebrated with teenagers as they crossed high school stages in caps and gowns. I’ve held the hands of birth mothers during supervised visits and stood silently behind protective glass in jails, watching families shattered by addiction and incarceration. I’ve waited in emergency rooms and ridden in the back of ambulances with children I love like my own.
This is what foster parenting looks like — not just for me, but for thousands of caregivers across our state. It is beautiful. It is exhausting. And too often, it is done alone.
North Carolina’s foster care system is in crisis. Today, over 11,000 children are in state custody, but according to the most recent data from “Who Cares,” there are only about 5,600 licensed foster homes. As a result, many children are placed in counties far from their schools, siblings, and everything else familiar, simply because there aren’t enough foster homes to meet the need. The children who enter care are not broken — but the system that holds them is.
