A Cal State LA professor is helping launch a national collaborative effort to prevent substance use among youth in foster care by working directly with the adults and advocates who support them.

Carly B. Dierkhising, professor in the School of Criminal Justice and Criminalistics, is serving as co-investigator on a five-year, $3.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop and test an innovative prevention program designed specifically for adolescents in foster care.

Youth involved in the child welfare system face an elevated risk for substance use due to trauma exposure, housing instability, and limited access to developmentally appropriate prevention services. Despite these challenges, few evidence-based prevention programs address the unique needs of this population.

The project, titled “Preventing Substance Use Among Youth in Foster Care Through a Collaborative Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) Brief Intervention,” brings together researchers from Cal State LA, Iowa State University, and the University of Oregon in partnership with CASA programs.

“For this five-year, NIH-funded project, we will develop an intervention for early adolescents in foster care aimed at preventing substance use and, subsequently, conduct a randomized controlled trial in the field,” said Dierkhising. “This is particularly important because there is a lack of programs aimed at older youth in the foster care system.”

She added, “This program will be innovative because it will be delivered by Court Appointed Special Advocates, who are volunteers working with children and adolescents in foster care. We have developed an advisory board that includes academics, CASA volunteers and administrators, foster parents, and young people with lived experience in foster care who will support the development and implementation of the intervention.”

Through the NIH grant, the project will implement the CASA Brief Intervention (CBI), a trauma-informed prevention model delivered by trained CASA volunteers who provide one-on-one advocacy and consistent adult support to youth in foster care. By embedding prevention within these trusted relationships, the team aims to increase accessibility, relevance, and sustainability.

The initiative has three primary goals: 

• Collaborate with community partners to develop a CASA-delivered intervention tailored for youth ages 11–14. 

• Test the program’s effectiveness in preventing substance use and related challenges through a randomized controlled trial. 

• Identify factors that support or hinder successful implementation to inform long-term sustainability and broader community impact. 

By leveraging the existing CASA infrastructure, which operates in 49 states and serves approximately 242,000 youth nationwide, the intervention has strong potential for scalability and long-term impact.

In addition to Dierkhising, the research team includes lead principal investigators Maria Schweer-Collins, assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University, and Leslie Leve, professor in the College of Education at the University of Oregon.

A faculty member in the Rongxiang Xu College of Health and Human Services at Cal State LA, Dierkhising is focused on research pertaining to trauma and systems-involved youth, with an emphasis on improving services and outcomes through collaborative, community-engaged approaches.

California State University, Los Angeles is the premier comprehensive public university in the heart of Los Angeles. Cal State LA is ranked number one in the United States for the upward mobility of its students. Cal State LA is dedicated to engagement, service, and the public good, offering nationally recognized programs in science, the arts, business, criminal justice, engineering, nursing, education, and the humanities. Founded in 1947, the University serves more than 22,000 students and has more than 260,000 distinguished alumni.