Wanted to share 2 youtube video's I found very Powerful

A Family For Every Child shared a link.

Life in Foster Care is like a Subway Ride Part I

www.youtube.com

I am Your Children's Aid, OACAS, First of two part virtual subway ride, NYICN, digital story, Youth in Care, National Youth in Care, Ombudsman, Advocate, Chi...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSU8qPl6bZo

 

 

LIfe in Foster Care is like a Subway Ride Part II

www.youtube.com

Part II of Life in Foster Care is like a Subway Ride. NYICN, Youth in Care, National Youth in Care, Ombudsman, Advocate, Children's Aid Society, Foster Care,...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L48O__pdGZs&feature=related

BROKEN SYSTEM

Since I have been doing this, now for 5 years, most things don't surprise me.  This article had a huge effect on me and inspired me to push even harder.

Christy

BROKEN SYSTEM

Twelve years ago, Texas Child Protective Services took 11-year-old Ashley Gallardo and her younger brothers from their home because workers believed they were not safe there. The State of Texas was never able to find her a better home.
After a stint in an emergency shelter, Gallardo and her brothers were separated and sent to foster homes in different parts of the state.
Then, after three years of bouncing around foster homes, she was told she'd be moving to a foster home in Mullen, only about 20 minutes away from her brothers' home. She was ecstatic.
Today, the 23-year-old Gallardo still remembers what her new foster mother said to her, and how it was only a matter of time before she would be separated from her brothers again: "If you think that you're going to mess with my husband, you better think again."
Apparently, the woman had heard about what happened at Gallardo's last foster home, in Star, which was this: Gallardo told her caseworker that her foster father tried to rape her.
She didn't last long there. Then it was on to a foster home in Austin, where, she says, she and her foster siblings slept in a bedroom locked from the outside. They had to knock when they wanted to leave. There were cameras in the corners, but she was never sure if they were actually on.
After that, she moved to another emergency shelter and another home, where she just watched the clock until she turned 18 and aged out of the system.
Gallardo was trapped in a foster care system that's been broken for years, despite admonitions and warnings from state agencies. With each new investigation, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, which oversees Child Protective Services, promised change. It never came.
Which is why, last March, a New York-based child advocacy group called Children's Rights sued Governor Rick Perry and state foster care officials on behalf of the approximately 12,000 children in the system's Permanent Managing Conservatorship program.
Children's Rights is claiming what official reports have indicated for years: that CPS does little to find permanent placement for kids in PMC, and that once the department sticks a kid in PMC, he or she is virtually forgotten.
According to the suit, roughly 500 children had been in state custody for more than ten years as of May 2010. Children's Rights also points to a 2006 Texas Comptroller's report that, while these children have been removed from abusive and neglectful homes, a child in state care "was statistically four times more likely to die than a child in the state's general population."
The suit alleges that CPS harms children in PMC by:
• exposing them to abuse and neglect by substandard providers;
• separating them from siblings, significant family members and their communities;
• failing to provide them with necessary mental health services;
• inflicting emotional harm by moving them too often; and
• severe mismanagement and understaffing, leading to a lack of caseworker visitation.
These problems are even reflected in a 2010 state-commissioned study of how the courts treat kids in PMC. Judges interviewed for the report complained of CPS caseworkers, prosecutors and attorneys ad litem often being unprepared for six-month court hearings. The report also stated that due in large part to a high caseworker turnover rate, these children typically have more than one caseworker.
While these children are in CPS care, the state is required to ensure their safety and well-being by actively seeking permanent homes for them. By failing to do so, CPS has subjected them to "permanent harm on an ongoing basis, in violation of their legal rights."
Children's Rights calls for "special expert panels" to review all PMC kids who have been moved more than four times, and all those who've been in PMC for two years, to ensure their needs are being met. The organization is also demanding that children be placed only in nationally accredited homes and facilities.
Yet the suit doesn't state who should be on those expert panels, or how they should be appointed. And it's similarly vague on how the state is supposed to meet its demands of finding permanent placement in a timely manner.
The lawsuit comes on the heels of what officials and other players in the world of family services say is a complete redesign of the foster system, and that a lawsuit now will only impede the process. CPS officials say they have a plan — for real — this time. They say the lawsuit would only do more harm than good.
But in 2010, the state's Adoption Review Committee said the same thing — of the foster system itself.
"There is increasing evidence to show that our foster care system is sometimes doing more harm to our children than good," the committee reported.
To better understand just how broken the state foster care system is — and has been for ages — wrap your head around this: In November 2010, while DFPS was getting ready to roll out its redesign, which was going to show everyone how the system would no longer be deplorable, staff members at a residential treatment center called Daystar beat a 16-year-old boy, hogtied him and threw him in a closet to slowly asphyxiate to death.
In a written statement, Department Commissioner Anne Heiligenstein swore that DFPS would do "everything we can to find out exactly what happened and if this death was, in any way, preventable."
It was just one of those stern-sounding things an official has to say after a tragedy, but in this particular instance, it was decidedly tone-deaf.
For one thing, it was the fourth restraint-related death for Daystar — which operated out of a series of double-wide trailers in a field in Manvel — and its sister companies. Of those, it was the second to be ruled a homicide. (Incredibly, after the first homicide in 2002, Daystar issued a statement suggesting that "the word 'homicide' has negative connotations...")
For another, Daystar had been placed on probation the very day the boy died, a result of a number of violations, including the finding that a staff member had sexually abused a mentally ill 16-year-old girl the year before.
In fact, Daystar's executive director had, on that same day, met with a DFPS program manager to discuss the department's "serious concerns."
But Daystar had been warned of "serious concerns" before. The previous deaths brought concerns. The revelation that Daystar staffers encouraged mentally ill girls to fight each other, rewarding the winners with snacks, was a concern. (The event didn't come to light until the Houston Chronicle and Texas Tribune brought it to light in 2010.) There were always concerns — but there were always contracts. Clay Hill, the owner of Daystar's parent company, made millions off the state.
Of Daystar, Department of Family and Protective Services spokesman Patrick Crimmins stated, "We took the appropriate steps in that case, at the appropriate times." (In addition to putting Daystar on probation and suspending CPS placement of children there, another step was the appointing of a special monitor to investigate practices at Daystar for three months. Although the monitor found problems with record-keeping and training in emergency behavior intervention, he also noted that "I truly enjoyed the time I spent at Daystar.")
Although Daystar is perhaps an extreme example, it's a good one for considering just how much DFPS will tolerate from the people it has caring for kids. And it's been that way for years.
In 1995, before some of the kids in Children's Rights' lawsuit were even born, a State Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General audit found that DFPS "did not actively supervise the child placing agencies and did not actively monitor the care of the children in the foster homes."
No controls were in place to make sure these agencies and homes were meeting standards, according to the audit. And "in many cases, caseworkers did not follow treatment plans or visit children under their care, foster children were placed in potentially harmful situations, background checks were incomplete and many foster parents were not trained." Based on its review of 78 case files, 34 children "never received a visit from the state caseworker since placement, which ranged from one month to four years."
A year later, Governor George W. Bush commissioned the Governor's Committee to Promote Adoption. The idea was to identify and remove the barriers to permanent placement. Not surprisingly, the report called for caseload reduction, increasing accountability among caseworkers, attorneys and the courts by mandating post-termination case reviews, and re-evaluating the foster care reimbursement system, among other things. No one paid much attention.
In 2004, Comptroller Carole Strayhorn issued Forgotten Children, a scathing report chronicling in detail the toxic effects that overloaded caseworkers, high turnover, lack of specialized care, and substandard providers had on children. Suddenly, Governor Rick Perry decided to take a gander at things. He ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to reform the beleaguered Child Protective Services.
Legislation in 2005 was supposed to reform CPS. As a 2007 report by Texas Appleseed, an Austin-based nonprofit, noted, the measures allotted $250 million in new state funds and mandated privatization of all child placement services.
But since much of the problem stemmed from "unmanageable investigative case­loads," CPS used the bulk of the new money to hire 3,200 investigators. The results were disastrous: New investigators meant more kids were pulled from homes and placed into foster care. (The number jumped from 13,431 in 2004 to 17,547 in 2006.) With no place to stick the newcomers, CPS ultimately admitted to a state Senate committee that some foster children were sleeping in CPS offices.
What little action was taken to privatize also backfired in 2006 when one provider that managed roughly 125 foster homes reported the abuse and deaths of three foster children in four months. (Today, CPS still operates under a dual system of private and department-run placement services.)
The Texas Appleseed report noted that, while the 2005 legislation required DFPS to increase safety measures such as wider background checks, there was little to address the problem of finding permanent homes.
In 2009, Perry borrowed Bush's idea, changed a few words around and called for the creation of an Adoption Review Committee. Its subsequent report stated, "Sadly, fourteen years later, [our findings] indicate that many of the same problems identified in 1996 still exist in the current child welfare system in Texas."
Children's Rights points to this history of inaction in its suit, saying the time has come for real change.
In order to sue on behalf of all kids in Permanent Managing Conservatorship, Children's Rights told the stories of nine kids located throughout the state.
The stories are similar to Shae's: kids uprooted from abusive homes, only to be shipped to homes and treatment centers of widely varying quality throughout the state. (Children's Rights would not make the plaintiff children available for interviews for this story, even though their names would not be used.)
"Defendants have long been aware of these and other deficiencies of the Texas foster care system, yet have failed to effectively address them — leaving many thousands of children to be harmed while in the state's care," the suit alleges. The group also asserts that "children in Texas's PMC will continue to be harmed, and their constitutional rights will continue to be violated, unless and until fundamental changes are made to this damaging system."
_____________________
The last time Shae tried to kill herself, it was because she was finally in a place where people loved her.
Lubbock's Nelson Home was, by her count, the 52nd facility she'd been shuffled to in her six years in Texas's foster care system. Shae (she asked that we not use her real name) wound up in the system because her alcoholic mom gave her black eyes and belt-buckle bruises.
At the Nelson Home, she expected more of the same: staff that were indifferent at best; another therapist to B.S.; and more waking up each day wondering if she was going to stay there or be shipped to another part of the state.
During her years in the system, state-contracted psychiatrists had plied her with more medications than she could remember. Prescribing psychotropic drugs to a preteen is much easier than finding her a home. Shae got to experience nearly every kind of accommodation the state has to offer a child who's ripped from his or her parents, separated from siblings and stuck someplace that, somehow, is supposed to help the child: emergency shelters, foster homes, treatment centers.
She'd just come from a lockdown facility in San Marcos, where, she says, the staff shot up residents with thorazine to keep them mute and malleable. Sometimes, its numbing qualities were a welcome respite. She didn't have to think about her surroundings. She didn't have to feel anything.
The Nelson Home was the first place she'd come to where she suspected that the staff might actually care about her. She panicked.
"I had gotten to the place where they wouldn't just give me a shot of thorazine," the 27-year-old says, 12 years later. "They made me feel my feelings."
They were feelings she couldn't process. Ultimately, she decided God didn't love her. In what she now admits was not a very well-thought-out suicide attempt, Shae swallowed a handful of disposable razor blades.
Shae left the system when she was 18, but she says she still has nightmares.
Looking back on it now, it only makes sense to her that, while learning to survive in the state's foster care system, she got to the point where someone's expressing genuine love and care would make her want to kill herself.
Seven years before Shae found hope at the Nelson Home, she was a heavily medicated nine-year-old. A state-contracted psychiatrist believed Shae was bipolar.
Her medication changed as she bounced around. Prescribing Zoloft, then Depakote, then lithium, then Ativan to a preteen is much easier than finding her a home.
Shae wanted to live with her ex-stepdad, the man she had always considered her father, but when he and her mother divorced, he had no legal ties to her. According to Shae, this is why DFPS never considered him for placement.
And because Shae had a tendency to run away, wherever CPS wound up sticking Shae, she was always a bit of a problem. The exact terminology was "oppositionally defiant."
This is how she wound up in the San Marcos Treatment Center, where her oppositional defiance and what she described as the staff's aggression fed off each other.
Shae says there were times when she was strapped to a bed and, for a reason she doesn't understand, covered with mosquito netting. The netting would make her gag, and she'd try her best to twist and turn so she wouldn't choke on her vomit.
There were fleeting moments of peace, like when investigators came for scheduled inspections.
On those days, she says, "you get back all the things that you're supposed to have as a normal human being. So you get your mattress back on a bed, you get to, like, have sheets on your bed. You don't get stuck with a needle that day if you're not supposed to have medication given to you." (A spokesman for San Marcos was unavailable for comment.)
Eventually, the restraints and thorazine wore her down to the point where she was no longer oppositionally defiant. She was numb.
San Marcos was one place Shae was never able to run away from. Security was just too tight. But if she had ever managed to sneak away, she knew where she would want to go. Straight to the man she calls her father to this day. In her eight years in state care, that was her one wish.
"I wanted to come home to my dad," she says. "And that's all I ever wanted as a kid. That's all I ever ran away for."
_____________________
The Children's Rights lawsuit does come in the midst of what, at least on paper, looks like an overhaul of the system.
DFPS Spokesman Crimmins puts it this way: "There have been periodic calls for reform, and periodic efforts at reform. But in our opinion, this is the first 'start from scratch' effort at remaking the foster care system which has involved all of the necessary parties, including judges, foster care providers, CPS, Child Care Licensing, advocates for change and interest groups...We have acknowledged that the system needs to be redesigned, and we are working hard on this effort."
The reform is based on the recommendations of what DFPS calls its Public Private Partnership, a collective of 26 "stakeholders" in child welfare, including caseworkers, private care providers and judges (see "The People Behind PPP").
Their recommendations include:
• contracting with child placement agencies that can offer a continuum of care in the same geographic area;
• switching to a performance-based payment system that rewards providers for improvements, rather than paying them less as a child improves (this was recommended by the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission in 1996);
• opening bids to profit and not-for-profit providers, including those based out of state, with preference given to providers with experience in Texas; and
• switching from a payment rate attached to levels of care to a "blended" rate.
These changes would be implemented in three stages, beginning with a limited number of "innovation zones" that would include both urban and rural areas.
And that appears to be it. That's the complete redesign of the state's foster care system.
One of the stakeholders in the Public Private Partnership was Tina Amberboy, executive director of the Supreme Court of Texas's Judicial Commission for Children, Youth and Families. Her take on the Public Private Partnership was reflected in the commission's astoundingly superficial annual report.
According to the report, every possible stakeholder in children's welfare has gone crazy with collaboration. The collaboration is so awesome that the report includes photos of these key players standing next to each other at various conferences. In fact, the collaboration even reached the point where Child Protective Services' leadership "talks weekly on the phone" with "key partners" about "all kinds of issues," according to DFPS Director Anne Heiligenstein's press-release-approved quote in the report.
Strangely, while the commission's own annual report is written solely as an exercise in public relations, an investigation it commissioned from Texas Appleseed — the same nonprofit that reported on CPS's problems in 2007 — dispenses with the fluff and actually delivers the goods.
Focusing solely on the courts' involvement in the child placement process, the Texas Appleseed report states that at the point a child enters PMC: "Though the state's responsibility for the child's life and well-being does not change — and arguably increases — the attention paid to the child's cases diminishes drastically. There is often a sense that the 'clock stops ticking' when the child enters [PMC]."
Judges interviewed for the report said that attorneys and caseworkers charged with looking out for a child's best interest "typically had done nothing on the case until a few days before the six-month PMC placement review hearing." This process is repeated until "months and even years go by in a PMC case without any real progress on finding the child a safe and permanent home."
And, due to high caseworker turnover, "a child exiting foster care in 2008 had an average of 3.87 caseworkers. This number increases with the number of years a child spends in foster care and in PMC. In 2008, a child exiting foster care after two to three years in PMC averaged 4.34 caseworkers, compared to an average of 6.39 caseworkers for children exiting after more than three years in PMC."
And while the caseload average per worker has dropped significantly — 29 cases in 2010, compared to 43.3 in 2007 — the Child Welfare League's recommended daily caseload average should be "no more than 15 to 17 children."
_____________________
"What we at this point want is recognition by the court that this is not only bad for children, but it's unconstitutional," says Marcia Lowry, Children's Rights' executive director. "And the state really needs to be mandated to do something about it."
The lawsuit is the only way she sees of throwing a lifeline to kids who are trapped in the system.
It's the kind of help Gallardo could have used years ago, when her foster father tried to rape her.
"He had been talking about how he wasn't sure that being a foster parent is what he wanted to do," recalls Gallardo, now living in Austin. "And it was weird being the person that he talked to about it, 'cause obviously I was really young...He would just say how unhappy he was, and he started making, like, comments about how I was physically maturing and how pretty I was. And I was like, 'Oh, wow, no one's ever told me these kinds of things before.'"
One day, Gallardo says, he pushed her against a wall and tried to force himself on her. She told her foster sister, her principal and her caseworker.
Gallardo was moved to a respite home for a month while her caseworker conducted an investigation that ultimately went nowhere. Star is a small town, and somehow word spread about Gallardo's allegation. Other than her foster sister, she didn't think anyone believed her. (Oddly, although Gallardo wasn't sexually active, girls in PMC are put on birth control. She started at 13, and, depending on what was easiest for each foster parent, this switched back and forth from a pill to a shot of Depo-Provera.)
After at least a month with the foster mother who locked her foster kids in the bedroom at night, Gallardo had had enough. The mother didn't allow the kids to use the phone, so Ashley wasn't able to tell her caseworker until she was able to make a call from outside the home.
But a caseworker who didn't believe a cry of attempted rape wasn't going to think twice about a locked door.
"I tried to tell my caseworker everything that was happening, and she didn't believe me," Gallardo says, "because obviously she didn't believe me about the incident that was huge that just happened a few months out. So she wasn't even trying to hear me out on this incident."
It wasn't until about three or four months in that home, during an unannounced visit, that the caseworker saw the locks on the door, and immediately removed the children.
Then it was back to a shelter for three months, then another foster home, where she stayed until the second she aged out. She was no longer the State of Texas's responsibility. She didn't have a driver's license. She didn't know how to sign a lease or open a bank account.
Gallardo, who today works as an advocate for foster children, never gave up on her dream of finding a family, even as an adult. Fortunately for her, she developed a close friendship with a married couple at work and, at age 23, she was finally able to do for herself what DFPS was never able to: find a family to adopt her.

A song for the newly adopted, "The Answer" by Sarah McLachlan

                                                                              Mom:

I will be the answer
At the end of the line
I will be there for you
While you take the time
In the burning of uncertainty
I will be your solid ground
I will hold the balance
If you can't look down

If it takes my whole life
I won't break, I won't bend
It will all be worth it
Worth it in the end
Cause I can only tell you what I know
That I need you in my life
When the stars have all gone out
You'll still be burning so bright

Child:

Cast me gently
Into morning
For the night has been unkind
Take me to a
Place so holy
That I can wash this from my mind
The memory of choosing not to fight

Mom:

If it takes my whole life
I won't break, I won't bend
It will all be worth it
Worth it in the end
'Cause I can only tell you what I know
That I need you in my life
When the stars have all burned out
You'll still be burning so bright

Child:

Cast me gently
Into morning
For the night has been unkind

This is my song, my prayer, for our adopted child, wherever she may be...

...a time to give back "Black Beauty"

Hello Readers,  I am not sure if any of you who have adopted, or are considering adopting a girl with African American Heritage, but I wanted to say a HUGE Thank you to Bailey Barrett, who has started this non-profit service for foster kids.  If you weren't aware, she does happen to be Christy's daughter!

African American hair and skin require a much different beauty regime than other cultures, and so this would be a great opportunity

to learn about how to care for your foster, or adoptee's daughter's hair from an expert!

Again, THANK YOU Bailey for what you are doing, it is much appreciated!!!

           Black Beauty

Every girl needs to feel beautiful, and have her time to shine. Black Beauty is for the girl who rarely gets the chance, and aren’t always able to have their hair done. This is an opportunity for girls who are in foster care to get their hair braided/done for free. All you have to do is buy the hair (or needed supplies), and set up an appointment to get it done, and the rest is taken care of for you!

Every girl needs their time to shine, and this is yours!!

Contact:     (Eug/Spfd area)

 Bailey Barrett-- (541)653-1471 or A Family For Every Child 541-343-2856

Or by e-mail: Baileysbeauty@yahoo.com or Christy@afamilyforeverychild.org

For any questions or comments, please don’t be shy to ask

           (this is not a registered Hair dresser- but a donated service)   

Siblings

Adoption of Siblings
A key issue in the matching process for many waiting
children is that they are to be adopted as a sibling group.
Especially when children have lost their parents due to
abuse or neglect, maintaining the sibling relationship is a
priority criterion when considering potential adoptive
families. Matching for these children involves finding a
family with whom all the children can be placed together.
In some cases, however, families may express interest
in some but not all siblings. A family, for example, may
be interested in adopting three of five siblings and may be open to meaningful contact with a
family who is interested in adopting the remaining two siblings. Should either family be encouraged
to stretch and adopt all five children?
Should each family’s preference be honored and
the sibling group be adopted by two families?
Or should the families not be approved to adopt
any of the children, a decision that means that
all of the siblings lose the opportunity for an
adoptive family? In such situations, it is important
to explore a family’s rationale for wishing
to adopt only certain children in the sibling
group. In some cases, the barriers may be
resolvable, such as when the family’s decision is
based on financial considerations and adoption
assistance can be arranged.
Although it may not always be feasible, caseworkers
should begin with the assumption that all siblings should be adopted by the same family. Both research and experience have proven the
importance of keeping siblings together in one family unless there are extenuating circumstances
that indicate that it is not in a child’s best
interest. In addition, practice has shown that
many families who intend to keep close relationships
between separated siblings do not, in
reality, do so over time. Caseworkers need to
take into account sibling relationships from
the child’s perspective, whether the relationships
are “of blood” or “of the heart.”
Although shared genetics are important and
provide a compelling reason for keeping siblings
together, existing emotional relationships
between children also need to be acknowledged
and preserved.

Extreme Recruitment-Family Finding

I wanted to share this great program with all of you.  We already do the Family Finding piece and have just recently gotten funding to build the rest of the Extreme Recruitment part, or at least pieces of it.  It is a very exciting new way to get kids out of care.

Christy

(sorry about the funky format)

The foster child thought she had nobody left to love her, but

she was wrong

By Nancy Cambria

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Sunday, Oct. 25 2009

ST. LOUIS - The search begins inside a sparse office in a corner of the St.

Louis family court.

Carlos Lopez, a 6-foot private investigator with a disarming smile, and his

partner Sheila Suderwalla sit at a computer side by side, scouring court

records, police files, motor vehicle records, occupancy permits and mug shots -

any clue that would lead them to a woman named Karen.

Karen is not a wanted criminal. And the partners are not looking to solve a

crime.

Suderwalla, a petite social worker with a driven passion for the underdog, and

Lopez are on the trail of something far more elusive: a lost relative with a

heart big enough and bloodlines strong enough to change the life of a

15-year-old foster child.

Her name is Lisa, and she feels as if she has nobody.

Lisa doesn't know it yet, but she is at the center of a groundbreaking $2

million federally funded St. Louis program called Extreme Recruitment, one of

the first programs in the nation that partners social workers with private

investigators in a gumshoe effort to reunite foster children with long-lost

family members.

For generations, finding permanent homes for many teenage foster children such

as Lisa has been largely a futile exercise because few are willing to adopt

older children. So caseworkers often settle for a hodgepodge of foster care

placements.

Extreme Recruitment takes a different approach.

When Suderwalla and Lopez were handed Lisa's case, they plunged headlong into a

fast-paced forensic search through her past.

They dissected the slim list of her known relatives, researched them and used

any connection they could to build a list of people who might potentially step

up for Lisa.

For two weeks they have knocked on doors, chased clues and hit dead ends. Now

they have a fresh lead: a woman named Karen who they were told might know a lot

about the girl's past.

The partners also have something else: a proven track record.

In as much as 70 percent of cases, Extreme Recruitment has permanently reunited

foster children with relatives. In almost all other cases, the program has at

least helped children reconnect with family.

It happened for Dereck, 17.

When Lopez and Suderwalla got his file, he had lived in 16 places. He was weeks

away from graduating from high school with just a caseworker to attend the

ceremony. The partners found a great-aunt in Indiana who began calling

relatives in St. Louis. By Dereck's graduation he had eight family members in

the audience.

"I was able to tell him, I want you to know you have some stand-up people in

your family, " Suderwalla said.

Extreme Recruiting has been so successful, it has teamed up with the Missouri

Children's Division and 19 private agencies to expand. In four years it aims to

connect 150 St. Louis foster teens with willing relatives.

"You can only sit behind a desk for so long, " explained Melanie Scheetz,

executive director of the Foster & Adoptive Care Coalition, which created the

program. "That is the big difference between our program and most everything

else that is going on around the country."

THEIR FIRST LEAD

Everything Suderwalla and Lopez know so far about Lisa they carry in an

overstuffed leather folder.

Inside is a white sheet of paper that holds a growing blueprint of Lisa's still

mysterious family tree.

They call it a genome, and the pair is building it, branch by branch, with

every clue they find. It already holds 60 half brothers and sisters, distant

cousins, aunts and uncles. Some are dead. One is in prison. Another is a

wealthy uncle who'd fled his past.

Somewhere amid the branches is a spot for Karen. But where? And the tree holds

other mysteries. There is a nickname they've heard that lingers as a clue.

Somewhere out there is a relative named Peaches.

And yet Suderwalla and Lopez cannot ask Lisa for help - they have yet to even

meet her. The program does not want to raise a child's hopes too soon.

They know enough about Lisa from her case file and others to worry. They were

told she was living in residential care because her foster placements had

failed. She was losing faith in adults.

Suderwalla and Lopez were warned that too many adults had let her down. She was

the last of her siblings without a home. If something wasn't done, she was

likely to "age out" of foster care with no family ties.

"If we just continue to have her in foster care until she ages out, she is

going to look for a sense of belonging, and most likely it will be with the

wrong influences, " Suderwalla says.

Suderwalla is used to diving into causes. She graduated from Principia College

in Elsah and headed a West Coast activist group on homelessness and poverty for

years. Later, she found working with minorities in foster care her calling. Few

understand that they are just kids needing the same unconditional love she got

growing up in Toronto, she said.

"I can't imagine a child not having even a little bit of what I've had, " she

says.

For a decade, Lopez had been a St. Louis detective assigned to juvenile crime,

winning trust with an upbeat voice and friendly handshake that played down his

role as a cop. Once he solved a kidnapping where the key clue was a Mickey

Mouse ring with a missing ear. But Lopez says cracking cases was a Band-Aid for

problems that needed surgery. This, he says, "is something where we can

actually fix something."

"It's healing, " adds Suderwalla.

As Suderwalla and Lopez sit, eyes on the computer screen, they rule out several

different Karens who had the same last name. Some are the wrong race; one is

the wrong age. None leads to Lisa.

Within a few keystrokes, the pair has a hit. A Karen with the correct last name

appears in an arrest report of a young man. He has listed her as an emergency

contact.

"Wait, " says Suderwalla. "He's on our genome."

Suderwalla plucks Lisa's family tree from the leather folder.

She runs her nail along several branches. Her finger stops. Yes, she nods her

head. He is also on Lisa's family tree. This is their Karen - and next to her

name is a recent address.

"She has got to be a connection on the dad's side of the family, " Suderwalla

says. If she can't take in Lisa, she might lead them to the person who could.

KNOCKING ON DOORS

There are three doors next to each other in the apartment complex. The one with

Karen's address stands in the middle. The partners don't hesitate to knock.

They have done this before.

Once Lopez told a woman she had a younger sister she'd never met who had been

put into foster care as a baby. Her sister had died. But she had a son who was

now a teen in foster care.

Some people cry, but many are angry.

"They see it as, 'Well, you've ripped our family apart, and now you want us to

help fix it?' So we have to tell people we're not the system, " Suderwalla

says. "We have to apologize."

Sometimes they find people such as Yolanda "Neicy" Walker, who hugged them when

they came to her door. For years she prayed for the return of a lost second

cousin who disappeared into foster care a decade ago.

Walker now plans to adopt the girl. She said her family always had room for the

child, but no one in the system ever asked. "It messed us up, " she said. "I

didn't get a chance to be asked if I would or wouldn't."

Lopez knocks on the middle door several times; nobody answers.

They knock on the other doors. One of them opens, revealing the silhouette of a

teen. A minute later the pair jog back to the car. The teen is Karen's

daughter.

"She said, 'That's my momma, ' and gave us Karen's phone number, " Suderwalla

says almost breathlessly. Within minutes they are on Karen's doorstep.

Karen smiles widely and lets them right in, but she is guarded.

"If we don't find someone that's appropriate for her to connect with, you know

what's going to happen, " Lopez says gently.

Karen nods. She recounts what she knows about Lisa's past.

Karen's aunt and uncle had taken in Lisa and her half sister when they were

toddlers, she says. Their birth mother had abandoned them. Lisa and her sister

were folded into a huge blended family. Karen's aunt had taken in at least 10

foster kids and formally adopted about half.

But Karen, a frequent visitor, witnessed more at her aunt and uncle's than any

social worker could. She says the younger children, including Lisa, suffered

years of mistreatment.

She and Khristine hated going over there, she says. They were appalled at what

they saw.

"Khristine?" Suderwalla asks.

She is sitting by a coffee table, adding new names to Lisa's family tree.

Khristine was a cousin who had just moved back to St. Louis from Chicago, Karen

says. The pair had an arrangement, Karen says. She'd call Khristine and tell

her the things she'd seen in their aunt and uncle's home. Khristine would call

Missouri's child abuse hot line.

"I was the eyes, " Karen says. "Khristine made the calls."

But it wasn't until three years ago, after Karen's aunt had died, that the

children were removed permanently from the home by the children's division,

says Karen. By law, the Missouri Children's Division cannot comment on any

foster child's case file, though Suderwalla's agency has confirmed that the

surviving parent lost custody in 2006.

There is a brief pause. A television drones in the background. Karen smiles

again, but she looks tired from talking. She's just gotten off work. It's a

good job. She has five children. A grandchild plays on her knee.

"We really apologize about what happened, " Suderwalla says.

Suderwalla and Lopez can see Karen's heart is in the right place. She can

certainly help. But can Karen's busy life take on another child? Suderwalla

asks who else might be willing to help Lisa.

"Talk to Khristine, " Karen says confidently and writes down her phone number.

Three days later, Suderwalla and Lopez meet with Lisa's formal team of social

workers, therapists, advocates and court officials for a weekly update on her

case. Suderwalla carefully tells the group about Karen and Khristine.

She does not ask why Khristine's hot line calls were dismissed or how a

state-licensed foster home that was abusive could take in so many children for

so many years.

Extreme Recruitment isn't about assigning blame for the past, Suderwalla would

say later, but making connections for a foster child's future. This was a group

who had been working with Lisa for years and shared current information and

opinions about who would be right for her. On this day something clicks.

At least one social worker knows of a family member called Peaches, but

Suderwalla had not put the two names together until now. Suddenly it makes

sense.

"It sounds like Peaches is Khristine, " Suderwalla tells the group. "And

Khristine is someone that (Lisa) trusted."

ARMS OF AN ANGEL

They find her at a Family Dollar store.

Khristine Williams, 40, a mother of two grown children, reluctantly returned to

St. Louis after being laid off from a longtime job in Chicago. She was getting

back on her feet and took a job at the store because it had health benefits.

It would have been easier to turn Suderwalla away when she called her cell

phone this morning. Khristine had for years distanced herself from her extended

family. She had told only a few of her relatives that she had moved back to

town. Some of them blamed her for breaking up her aunt and uncle's family. Did

she really want to open this door?

But Lisa was a part of her past she just couldn't shake. She had taken Lisa to

Chicago for visits. Lisa called her Peaches.

So here she stands, in the middle of a store full of tube socks and hair

scrunchies, with two strangers.

She grips a nearby shopping cart. She fears they are going to tell her that

Lisa is pregnant. But Suderwalla has something else to say.

"She's the last one, " Suderwalla says. All of the other children with her aunt

and uncle have been successfully placed in homes.

Khristine brushes the copper and gold braids from her face and takes a quiet

breath. For a moment she looks angry, but her eyes grow sad.

It was unfair that Lisa was all alone- the younger children in that home

suffered, she says.

She says Lisa's birth sister was locked in the closet for hours at a time. Once

Khristine set up a hairstylist for the girls, but later found Lisa's sister's

hair ruined. Someone at the home had thrown water on her head and told her she

was ugly. A slut. The girl was 12.

Khristine starts to cry.

Lopez turns quickly and walks off, returning with a handful of paper towels.

Suderwalla draws in closer.

Khristine takes the tissue and wipes her eyes. "I'm sorry, " she says. "I was

abused as a child."

She says she told adults about it, but was ignored. It was the same way with

Lisa and the other children, she says. Police came to her aunt and uncle's door

many times, but nothing ever happened.

"Why would they just leave?" Khristine says, her voice rising. "Those kids had

to ask, 'Why do they just leave?' They knew. These kids just knew. It wasn't

right."

When the state took custody, Khristine says, she tried to help.

"I wanted to adopt them, " she says of Lisa and her sister. A social worker

told her it would take three years because she lived in Chicago.

"No, no, no, " mutters Suderwalla, shaking her head so her hair swings. "More

like three months."

They stand fixed in a triangle at the center of the store. It is quiet, but for

a song on tinny speakers.

"In the arms of an angel far away from here, " the singer lulls. "In the arms

of an angel; You may find some comfort here."

Lopez thinks to himself, it's a sign. He and Suderwalla try not to put their

hopes in one person. But they usually know when they've found the one who will

take charge of the destiny of a child. Have they found her here?

It is time to ask.

"Would you be willing to be a part of her life?" Suderwalla says.

Khristine Williams sifts the question in her mind.

Her life had already taken her far away from here. She had only reluctantly

come back to St. Louis. There are no guarantees she can make it work with Lisa.

But now she knows she is deeply needed here.

"Yes, " she says. "I will."

AT THE VERY BEGINNING

It is a week later, and Suderwalla clips in high heels into a conference room

crowded with 13 social workers, therapists, court advocates and others. Lisa's

case is far from closed. There will be family counseling, visits, weeks of

meetings and court dates before Khristine can take Lisa home. The target date

is December.

Suderwalla clutches a new case file.

"OK. We're not going to look back, " she tells the group as she stands near a

blank flip chart, ready to record the first clues. "And we're not going to lay

blame or ask what should have been done differently."

The group begins.

This foster child is 11. She has lived in 11 different placements.

The girl has few friends. She is seeking approval from older girls. She is

dressing promiscuously. She is traumatized. She had seen her mom kill her dad.

Suderwalla stops. She needs them to start at the very beginning.

"OK, " she says. "Who knows how to spell her name?"