November is National Adoption Month. Since 1995, our country has been honoring this month as an opportunity to bring awareness to the importance of adoption and foster care. This year, the Children’s Bureau announced the focus of National Adoption Month will be on a particularly underserved group of children: teens in the foster care system.

Teens are much less likely to be adopted, meaning many of them spend the majority of their childhood in foster care only to age out of the system at age 18, parent-less. The odds are against these teens.

According to the National Foster Youth Institute, more than 23,000 children age out of the foster care system each year. Twenty percent of these children will become instantly homeless. They have less than a three percent chance of receiving a college degree, and twenty-five percent of them will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. These are the some of the most forgotten children in our nation and they are suffering because of it.

Fortunately, organizations and groups of people are helping bring awareness to teens aging out of the system and how communities can help. For example, the Christian Alliance for Orphans (CAFO) has an Aging Out Initiative dedicated…