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This article is being co-published with The Imprint, a national nonprofit news outlet covering child welfare and youth justice.
Before aging out of New York City’s foster care system, Marcus Diego shuttled in and out of 14 homes. Every few months, he’d arrive in a new place, toting a black plastic trash bag filled with everything he owned in the world.
Sometimes, his foster parents or caseworker would pack up his room while he was at school and a garbage bag full of things he didn’t choose would arrive at the next destination. Whenever he got the chance to pack the bag himself, he often had to make hard choices about what to leave behind.
“They told me, ‘Whatever doesn’t fit, throw it away. We’ll get new stuff,’” Diego, now 27, said. But those promises were rarely kept.
Now, two similar pieces of legislation to end the common practice of giving foster youth trash bags to transport their belongings are before New York state and city lawmakers. The bills, which seek to provide every foster child with their own luggage, are part of a nationwide push for child welfare agencies to abolish policies that critics say humiliate foster youth and steal their sense of worth.
The state bill would require New York’s Office of Children and Family Services to distribute luggage through each county’s social service agency, and submit an annual report to the governor to track progress. If passed, the statewide legislation would cover New York City as well and take precedence, said state Sen. Jabari Brisport, the bill’s sponsor.
Brisport called his proposed legislation a “common sense” solution for thousands of children. Given everything foster youth already go through, he said in an interview, doling out garbage bags “just adds insult to injury.’’
The roughly 13,000 children in New York foster care experience about 23,000 transitions per year, according to the proposed bill. On average, each child lives in three different placements while under the government’s care.
New York state already has a program to provide foster youth with duffle bags — the My Bag initiative, which launched in 2021. But critics called the program limited in its reach — only around 3,500 bags were distributed in 2023, the latest figure available from the Office of Children and Family Services. Even fewer were allocated in 2024 — roughly 2,700 bags, according to numbers shared with The Imprint.
Brisport’s bill would expand the state’s current efforts through increased funding. Under the My Bag initiative, each duffel bag costs the state $12, with an average annual cost ranging from roughly $31,000 to $65,000. Brisport’s legislation calls for $200,000 in annual funding.
The bill’s text specifies “luggage” as “a durable suitcase, duffel bag, backpack, or similar reusable container that is new or is in new-like condition, and is designed to hold an individual’s personal belongings and is not a disposable bag, trash bag, or cardboard box.” It directs agencies to supply these for foster youth when they enter the system, move between homes, exit care, or head to college.
“For many foster children, their possessions are more than just objects; they are symbols of their identity, history, and worth,” the bill states. “New York State foster youth deserve better; yet, they currently have no legal guarantee of a dignified transition with the proper luggage that every American uses for everyday travel or transitions.”
Similar legislation has found success in other states, including Maryland, Texas, Illinois and Oregon.
Texas requires its Department of Family and Protective Services to record every time it fails to provide a child with proper luggage, as a way of checking on how the new luggage policy is being followed. Last year, the Lone Star State — home to 28,000 foster youth — handed out 12,000 pieces of luggage, according to a 2024 annual report. The department also documented 62 instances in which a trash bag was used to transport a foster youth’s personal belongings.
In 2021, Illinois lawmakers prohibited the use of trash bags, shopping bags and empty pillow cases for such moves.
At the time, a nonprofit organization called Pink Lemons stepped in and donated suitcases to child welfare agencies across the state. Today, Pink Lemons’ Facebook page notes that their foster youth advocacy, “all started with suitcases for youth exiting child welfare to ‘roll out in style.’”
“Most of the time when a child receives a suitcase the biggest reaction is tears,” Founder Sheryl Maria White said said in a 2022 interview. “Because it’s a big deal when you’ve never owned anything in your life.”
In New York City, which is home to nearly 6,500 foster care youth, the legislation being considered by council members would require the city’s Administration for Children’s Services to provide luggage. Although the city has the largest population of foster youth in the state, it did not receive any bags from the My Bag program in 2023, according to a former foster youth and policy advocate.
The city bill is sponsored by council member Rita Joseph, who was inspired by her own experiences fostering and then adopting two children — a boy aged 13 and his 1-year-old brother — more than a decade ago. In an interview with Gothamist, Joseph said she took her sons shopping for suitcases the day after they arrived at her home with garbage bags. Then she made it her mission to do something about those bags once she became a council member, she said.
Ending the practice of giving children disposable trash bags for their belongings would “symbolize treating foster youth with respect and dignity,’’ she said in an interview with The Imprint.
“As a foster mom, I know firsthand how degrading it was for my children to carry their belongings in trash bags,” Joseph, who also chairs the education committee, told lawmakers recently. “This is unacceptable, and New York City must do better.”
When Joseph decided to push for the city legislation, she sought advice from Sofie Fashana, a former foster youth who was instrumental in the success of a similar bill in her home state of Oregon.
In Oregon, Fashana said, most of the opposition to ending the use of garbage bags came from foster care agencies.
“I hear all the time from foster groups how trash bags are ‘efficient’ and that ‘safety matters,’” said Fashana, who, along with other current and former foster youth, helped draft the language for both proposed bills in New York. “But you’re not prioritizing safety when you’re neglecting emotional safety.”
Fashana now lives in New York City and works as a policy advocate focusing on foster youth and the unhoused at the Next100 think tank. A page on the organization’s website features the experiences of foster youth who moved in garbage bags, including one 21-year-old who recounted moving from group home to group home: “My belongings were packed in big black garbage bags, even to the point where my things got mixed up with trash and my belongings got thrown out and I was transported with trash, not knowing.’’
Fashana also remembers receiving disposable trash bags while in foster care, and the message it conveyed to her: “You’re worth trash.’’
“It’s $15 to give somebody a sense of confidence and a sense of being worth something, and that’s worth fighting for,” she said about the state bill’s estimate of the cost of each suitcase.
Diego, who now works a part-time security guard job while also studying psychology at Lehman College in the Bronx, said he eventually lost track of all the clothing, school supplies and books that went missing during his many moves. When he was 16, a caseworker even threw away his laptop before one transition. “You won’t need one until college, anyway,” he remembers being told.
Often, the lost items were more than just things to Diego. They were parts of himself that he was trying to hold on to, like his art and drawing materials and scripts from school plays.
“I tried to have a normal life, to do extracurricular activities like the performing arts,’’ he said, “but I could never do them because I was moving.”
Destenie L., 17 and living in Albany, remembers being handed garbage or grocery bags before each of her four foster home moves, which began when she was 11. Sometimes, her belongings would poke and rip through the thin plastic, fall out and disappear. The one precious item she made sure to never put in the bags was a Polaroid photo of her three siblings.
Now a member of one of the city’s Youth Leadership Councils, Destenie is among those rallying for the city and state legislation.
“It’s humiliating,” she said of the trash bags. “I think it’s normalized, and I wanted to make a change.”