Greetings Permanency Champions,
Current Permanency related articles:
From Foster Care to Yale: Why Doctor King Mattered to Me
Rodney Walker – From age five to 17, I spent approximately four thousand days in the Chicago foster care system. I lived in over a dozen different homes — many of them before I started high school. Although there were so many families whose kindness saved my life and whom I can never thank enough, it was still a tough decade.
When I was 17, shortly after leaving foster care, I became homeless for four months. The challenges of being a homeless teen are indescribable — but I have a role model whose inspiration means a lot to me: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His words are a testament that even I could have a dream, and make it a reality.
Darla Henry – Preparing Children and Youth for Adoption or Other Family Permanency
We were pleased to work in partnership with the Child Welfare Information Gateway to produce this recently published bulletin. The bulletin reviews past preparation practices and those practices that are more current and in development that are designed to “…ensure that children and youth are better prepared for permanent family relationships, including both legal and relational permanency (permanent relationships with caring adults).”
A Different Home – A New Foster Child’s Story
Written by Dr John DeGarmo and Kelly DeGarmo; Illustrated by Norma Jean Trammell
A sensitive picture book to help ease the anxieties of foster children aged 4 to 10 entering placement. Written in simple language and fully illustrated in color, this storybook is designed to help children in care, or moving into care, to settle in and answer some of the questions they may have. Accompanied by notes for adults on how to use the story with children, it will be a useful book for foster parents and caseworkers, as well as social workers, teachers and anyone else working with children in foster care.
Make Foster Care Work, Let Churches Lead
Every two minutes, a child enters foster care in the U.S. About 400,000 children live in these temporary homes, a quarter of them permanently separated from their biological families and available to be adopted. Many never find permanent families; the lucky ones wait an average of more than three years to be adopted. The New York Times recently described a child who bounced through more than 40 different homes after entering the New York City foster system at age 12. In 2011, 26,000 foster children turned 18 and aged out of the system — up from 17,000 in 1998.
But, as a new program initiated five years ago in Georgia suggests, these hurdles aren’t insurmountable. The nonprofit FaithBridge was started by Bill Hancock, a director of counseling programs who had lived on the streets as a teenager, and Rick Jackson, an Atlanta businessman who had spent time in the foster-care system.
Secrets and Lies: A New Ohio Law Opens the Adoption Closet
Under a newly enacted law, adult adoptees in Ohio can now seek access to their original birth certificates. With this change, Ohio joins a small number of states that have made an about-face in thinking about the role of secrecy in adoption, and have joined the gradual shift towards greater openness.
Inspired by ‘Dispiriting’ Work: A Child Welfare Worker’s Thoughts
Most people who work outside the field of child welfare tend to assume that my work is dispiriting. They hear the words “foster care” and immediately think “at-risk youth,” a loaded term that conjures only negative images. They imagine that I am out every day fighting the good fight, doing charitable work for the needy. The truth is I have the best job in all of New York City.
PSAs ~ 31,000 older youth awaiting adoption in the U.S. foster care system
Today, nearly 102,000 children (under 18 years of age) are available for adoption from the foster care system in the United States; more than 30 percent (31,000) are between the ages of 11 and 17, according to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis Report System (AFCARS 2012). To encourage prospective parents to consider adopting an older youth from foster care, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, AdoptUSKids and the Ad Council are unveiling new public service advertisements (PSAs) today.
I Love You Mom: Please Don’t Break My Heart
| I Love You Mom – Please Don’t Break My Heart is the true story, by John Borgstedt, of one boy’s journey through a childhood of physical, mental, and emotional abuse. John endured neglect, isolation, physical beatings, mental degradation and malevolent admissions into numerous mental institutions, and eventual attempted murder within the custodial supervision of his unscrupulous mother. This literary work is indeed John’s factual account of his small, bruised body clinging to life, his struggle as a teenager fighting and winning against insurmountable odds, and his entrance into young manhood as a warrior for the young and innocent, protecting them from experiencing a similar childhood of hell on earth. |
Why Calif.’s Lifeline Wireless is a Big Deal for Foster Youth
As reported in The Chronicle of Social Change last week, California has extended its emergency telephone program for low-income households to include wireless options. So why is this a big deal? We asked Cox to lay out some of the impact of the program on the lives of foster youths.