Five/Fourteen

Five/Fourteen is the only foster agency dedicated solely to providing services and support to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer, two-spirit, and otherwise gender-independent children and youth in foster care.

There are thousands of LGBTQ2S youth in care in Ontario.

Yet, until Five/Fourteen, no agency was entirely dedicated to their care, and there wasn’t a single designated safe foster placement for youth on the rainbow spectrum.

On May 14, 2012, “My Real Life Story”, a report of the Youth Leaving Care hearings, was released by the Office of the Provincial Advocate of Ontario. The report highlighted a badly broken system, discouraging outcomes for young adults who had been raised in foster care. Out of that report was born the Youth Leaving Care Working Group’s “Blueprint for Fundamental Change to Ontario’s Child Welfare system”, which, along with reports from Egale Canada Human Rights Trust and the City of Toronto, and data from UCLA’s William’s Institute, the Child Welfare League of America and Lambda Legal, points to a dire need to improve things for LGBTQ foster youth, who have the highest risks for sexual abuse, physical and verbal assault, and suicide.

Lucas Medina, Five/Fourteen’s Executive Director, was unnerved at the realization that the stories he read in these reports were all too familiar, all too similar to his own experiences as a crown ward many years before. He contacted the Office of the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth to find out how he could get involved, and was invited to join a new committee, You Are Not Alone, which would meet with LGBTQ youth in and from care from across Ontario to get their stories of life in foster care.