Beyond The Foster Care System: The Future for Teens

Chapter 4: Policy Advocacy with Teens

Teens seemed to encounter so many immediate problems that were endemic to the system. Even with our growing interest in preparing teens for their future, we felt compelled to make life more manageable for teens while in care. But the system wasn’t going to change because we were teaching foster teens about their rights and the rudiments of advocacy. We often felt unsatisfied working at solving individual and small group problems. We would resolve a problem, but the system never changed, and the overall future prospects for the teens remained dismal. This made us want to find other ways to improve conditions for teens. If we could change system policy, then teens who aged out of care might be prepared for independence. Thus we turned our efforts toward policy change. We needed to focus on one area or issue facing teens. Through the workshops , we came into contact with many girls and young women who were pregnant or had children. The system treated them in a manner that assured their failure to become independent and to become successful parents also failed and to prevent a new generation of children from being raised in foster care. We explored different approaches to advocating for changes that would make the system more responsive to teen mothers’ needs and would give their babies a more stable and better start in life. At the time, other groups were ignoring this issue. We had a chance to establish our reputation as experts on this issue. The density of the issues these girls faced—foster 79 4 Policy Advocacy with Teens Xaranda care, babies, pregnancy, welfare, education deprivation—appealed to us as a substantial challenge. We believed that the ways in which the system was failing—for example, holding these babies in the hospitals for weeks on end because of a shortage of foster homes—would engender support from a wider community because of the obvious unnecessary costs, human suffering , and wasted potential. Additionally girls’ and women’s foundations might be willing to fund work in this area. We had to consider this funding issue if we wanted to stay in business. After considerable deliberation, we developed a Teen Mother Youth Advocacy Project to prevent young mothers in foster care from being unnecessarily separated from their babies. The project also tried to make sure that the teen mothers received services to support them and their babies. The project had several components: legal advocacy, educational workshops, and policy advocacy. In all these aspects, we involved the teens as partners in deciding strategy and actually doing the work. We thought their involvement was necessary to bring some rational solutions to the problems in foster care. Betsy A girlish, almost babyish voice came over the phone in a rush, “Miss Betsy? You don’t know me, miss, but I was told to call you because I really need help. See, I’m going to have a baby, and I need to get out of this place.” From what I could piece together, her name was Xaranda. She spelled it for me, “X like x-ray, a like apple . . . but you can just say it like Sheronda.” None of her brothers or sisters was in foster care, but she told me that she and her father didn’t get along, and he signed her into care. At seventeen she got pregnant, with her boyfriend Luis who also lived at the RTC. As soon as she figured it out, six weeks into the pregnancy, Xaranda told her social worker. Xaranda was practically yelling at me, “You know what they told me? ‘Okay, don’t worry about it. We have everything under control. We’ll make sure you get to a maternity shelter,’ ‘Maybe I better call Pam, my family court lawyer?’ I ask them. ‘No, no need,’ they say.” Xaranda took no time to pause or even breathe as she continued her story, “Three months later, I’m still sitting in here, and I’m like, I got to move! Beyond the Foster Care System 80 I called my caseworker. I asked her about my placement, ‘What’s going on with my placement for a maternity shelter?’ And she was like, ‘I cannot speak with you because you are the child. I only speak to the social workers.’ I just felt she was a fool. Meantime my real social worker, she is on her own maternity leave so...