Courage & Resilience: A Foster Child's Story of Success

How do some kids survive a life of poverty, homelessness, abuse, and foster care and eventually thrive? We talk about courage & resilience with David Ambroz who is a national poverty and child welfare expert and advocate and the author of the memoir, A Place Called Home. He was recognized by President Obama as an American Champion of Change. Currently serving as the Head of Community Engagement (West) for Amazon, Ambroz previously led Corporate Social Responsibility for Walt Disney Television, and has served as president of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission as well as a California Child Welfare Council member. After growing up homeless and then in foster care, he graduated from Vassar College and later earned his J.D. from UCLA School of Law. He is a foster dad and lives in Los Angeles, CA.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Poverty and Homelessness:
  • His story.
  • School
  • What made a difference?
  • What should adults who encounter or work with homeless children/youth know?
• Foster Care:
  • His story.
  • Youth who identify as LGBTQ+ are overrepresented in foster care (Human Rights Campaign, 2015). While approximately 5 percent of the general population is estimated to be LGBTQ+, studies estimate that about 30 percent of youth in foster care identify as LGBTQ+. Why are these young people over represented in child welfare? LGBTQ+ youth are 1.5 -2 times more likely to have a foster placement failure.
  • What would you want foster parents to know?
• What made the difference in your eventually succeeding? (Going to Vassar and UCLA Law School.)
• The lack of available treatments for mental illness.
• Why did you become a foster parent?
• Why did you title the book “A Place Called Home?”

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated script.

This is Creating a Family. Talk about foster, adoptive, and kinship care. Welcome
back to our regulars and especially welcome to you newbies. We are so glad to have
you here. I'm Dawn Davenport. I am the host of this show as well as the director
of CreatingaFamily .org. Today we're going to be talking with a former foster youth,
David Ambrose. It is A wonderful interview about his new book is a story of how
did some kids survive a life of poverty, homelessness, abuse, and foster care,
and not only survive, but also ultimately thrive. We talk about courage and
resilience with David, who is a national poverty and child welfare expert and
advocate and author of the memoir, A place called home. He was recognized by
President Obama as an American champion of change. He currently serves as the head
of community engagement for Amazon. He previously led corporate social responsibility
for Walt Disney Television and has served as the president of Los Angeles City
Planning Commission as well as a California Child Welfare Council member. After
growing up homeless and Then in foster care, he graduated from Basser College and
later earned his JD law degree from UCLA School of Law. He is a foster dad and he
lives in Los Angeles, California. I love this book and I love this interview.
This will be a repeat of an interview we did a while back. It was so good, we
want you to hear it again. We hope you enjoy it and find as much inspiration as I
did. - Welcome, David Ambrose, to "Creating a Family." I love the book, "A Place
Called Home." It is a memoir. I loved it. It was a hard read, but it also was
bizarrely inspirational. I mean, because it was hard. - Yeah. - And we're gonna be
talking about the book, but also about your life, but also about quite frankly,
your courage and your resilience. And our audience is predominantly foster parents and
adopted parents and professionals. So I think we have a lot to learn from you. I
thought it would help to start kind of separate it because you had time with
extreme poverty and homelessness when you were living with your mom and then you had
time and foster care. So I thought, I think that the issues are some of them the
same, some of them quite different. So I thought we would separate those times of
your life. First of all, start off telling us your story, how you became homeless,
how you entered into foster care and just give us the background. - Yeah,
well, thank you for the intro and sharing kind of the things I've done and the
journey to get there is as interesting as many of your listeners have encountered in
their own important work. I was born into homelessness. There was no before time.
There was no fall from grace. There was just your homeless. And from my earliest
memories, it was moving from place to place, bus stations and subway stations and
parks and shelters and churches and outdoors all over New York city and surrounding
areas. And we just were consistently and constantly mobile. And by the way, it's me,
my brother, my sister, all of us within a year of each other. Yes. And you were
the youngest and you had, and all three, it was your brother, your sister, then you
and all three within three years of each other. Yeah. And my mom, and that was it.
And my mom has and had and still has a progressive mental illness,
kind of a laundry list. And we just live in a society that does not respect,
treat or elevate or help families like mine or women like my mom. So we went from
one crisis situation to another. I started the book, sharing a story. It was one of
my motivating factors for writing the book. In Los Angeles, in many places, there's
a homelessness crisis. And I don't know that it's more, I think it's just more
invisible. But I share the first story because so much of the dialogue has been
about cleaning it up. And I have been very offended by the it of it all.
We dehumanize the whole people, my people. And I recall very distinctly one of my
first memories was being swept out of Grand Central where we were sleeping. I was
about four and we were put on the street and we almost died from exposure.
It was very much the first time I thought we might die, although I didn't have the
words at the time. And so I wanted to share my story because I think we can solve
it. I think we've made progress, but I think the way that we do that is inspiring
each other, by nourishing each other with love and support. And I also wanted people
to stop this constant chasing of Frankenstein. And by that, I mean all the people
involved in the system, poverty, foster care, what have you, are just consistently
denigrated by the larger public. And I wanted to humanize all of us that are part
of this work. And that's what I hope I did, especially in the first part of the
12 years I spent homeless.
And you did humanize the existence of what the reality is like. One question,
did you, Did your mom have extended family? Was there anybody who could,
in your extended family, her parents, her siblings, my father, anybody who could have
stepped in and did or did not? - Yeah, so my mom was like a hurricane,
slow moving but destructive. And so you usually hid and locked things down or
relocated to avoid death and destruction. So there were members of the family,
and I do not hold a grudge against them. Obviously, I wish they had intervened, but
it was simply the case that my mom was just a very destructive force. I tell the
story in the book where we were homeless, and we made our way to what turned out
to be my uncle's home, and my uncle had to prioritize his family.
He has two children with, I believe, had disabilities, you know, wife, and my mom
apparently had been there before I'm announced to me and she was not welcome and
neither were we. So he turned us back out onto the street in the middle of winter,
which was not atypical.
Family, systems, I always think about poverty especially in the early part of the
book as if you're like the person in poverty is like a drowning victim on the side
of a lifeboat, and a lifeboat has a few different people in it, and one of them
reaches down and pulls the person out of the water, and the person goes, "Oh, it
takes a breath." And then they drop him back in the water, and he's grateful for
the breath, but boy would have been nice to get into the boat. But don't worry,
there's another program who's going to pull you out of the water for a second. So
it's just a constant feeling like this for my mom, who just, There was no end to
the processes by which she had to pursue to access benefits and some of it was
just Kafkaesque, like you needed an address to apply for rental assistance.
We were homeless, you know, food stamps and they would warn you about not overeating
when we would always run out of food in the middle of the month because there were
never enough. So there's these bizarre moments in the system. But then again, I am
a child of welfare. I would not be here without our imperfect child welfare, foster
care, and poverty reduction systems. So I remind people of that. Because if we
constantly scream fire in the face of the public, do you know what we have to pay?
We have to pay firefighters. The public does not want to run into a burning
building. And the reality is in my lifetime, we've had the number of kids living in
poverty, we could do more. We should do more. But we should also nourish each
other, like I said, with the belief in each other that we're doing the work. And
we need more of that messaging. - Yeah, we absolutely do. - I hope you were finding
this conversation as fascinating as I am. As you can tell, I loved both the book
and I am enjoying talking with the author immensely. I want you to know that we
have other free resources that are available to you. We have 12 free courses that
are available through the support of the Jockey Being Family Foundation. Thank you,
Jockey Being Family. And the 12 courses are parenting type courses.
They're really intended for people who are actively parenting. Go to bit .ly
/JBFsupport. That's B -I -T dot L -Y slash all one word,
J -B -F support, and check out the variety that is there. I think you will find it
inspirational and enjoyable. All right, so you lived mostly homeless for the first 12
years of your life, but part of your mom's mental illness was also extreme abuse
and you never knew how to predict it because she wasn't always that way.
Yeah yeah you know I talk about it a lot is part of what we had to do was
predict the unpredictable and to the extent we could mitigate it. My mom's violence
was unexpected in terms of the exact exact moment, but always coming.
And it was not just the physical violence, it was the expectation of such that
created, I think, lifelong trauma. You know it's going to come, you don't know when
it's gonna come. And sometimes you can see certain things that would trigger her.
And then around us, it was just a community of violence, be it the folks in the
shelters or what we saw on the streets. And even violence in a different way. When
I was growing up in New York City, it was the AIDS epidemic, and all around us
were men dying in the shelters. There's so many different types of deprivation and
violence. It was almost white noise, even though it was painful. It was just what
our day -to -day was. It was also traumatic. I mean, being exposed, you might not
have recognized it as a child because it was your day to day. But it had to be,
I mean, as an adult, looking back and knowing that there was that much violence and
death and everything in your, do you perceive that as a trauma? It's interesting.
You know, I'm not trained like some folks that might be listening or my sister is,
I'll say it this way, it was normal. You know, a lot of folks, there was no
deviation. There was no like this is atypical. So it was a very intense furnace
that made me the steel man that I am. And I reacted to it in a certain way,
which I talk about, particularly when I entered foster care, which is I shut down
part of my emotional capacity. And so in that, sure, it was absolutely traumatic.
And then the violence related to my sexual orientation,
immeasurably damaging. So yes, absolutely. But also today, I am my mom's caregiver.
I am one of her caregivers, I'm one of her guardians. I have two siblings that
are, you know, we're jumping ahead a little bit, but they're wildly successful,
healthy with families and marriages. So Absolutely, yes. And success doesn't negate
that people still operate with trauma. But I think we all take it in and do
different things. What I often would do and how I describe it in my mind is I
would take all these experiences from as early as I can remember, but really when I
entered foster care and I would put them in a clear plastic box and I'd put them
on a shelf and I could see them. I could see what it was because it's clear. I
would write down a description, I'd file it away. I knew where it was
intellectually, but I didn't have to feel it. And that's how I got through every
single day of just yet another mountain to climb. But in my late 30s, the shelf
broke. And I realized that my coping mechanism was profoundly unhealthy.
And you know, you call it trauma. It was just a, it was not the right way to
interpret and interact with the world and yet it's saved me and helped me survive.
So often our coping mechanisms were life -saving. They are not necessarily life
-affirming as we move on, but without a doubt that well might have saved your life.
Before we leave some of the poverty, that part of your life, the first 12 years,
the poverty and abuse and homelessness, what was school like for you during that,
you know, homeless youth in school, homeless children in school are a real issue.
But I think so often they're the tip of the iceberg because they're the ones who
are attending school. The vast majority of homeless children don't. But anyway, so
what was what was your ability to go to school? I really don't remember much school
until I was in my early teens. There are periods where we were in school and those
periods were super important but they were infrequent but they were places where we
were warm or cold or dry where we were not hit. There were moments of just
beautiful kindness expressed in weird and beautiful ways that I had a teacher who
would slip granola bars in my bag. Knowing that we would not eat.
I had a school nurse, I remember very distinctly the first time I was treated for
lice at school. She, to my recollection, was one of the first adults to touch me
not in violence or otherwise, just a complete compassion. And I enjoyed her touch.
It was so loving. And that was in the text of her, if anyone's ever had lice,
that shampoo is not fun. And yet I remember it so warmly where this adult and the
lice pick, you know, and that's not fun either. And yet you were probably loving
the touch. I, it was just at a beautiful moment where an adult was tenderly caring
for me. And then, you know, my real education was sometimes at the hands of my
mom's fists, sometimes at the indifference of the public, often the lessons were
never taught in school books. I learned to read not in school, but because of my
mother and then in public libraries, where I also learned to wash our clothes and
bathe myself in the Wendy's restroom or how to make tampons for my mom out of
toilet paper and paper towel. When she needed those, it was one of my jobs. So
education is an interesting word. I think it is the transmission of values,
ideas and norms as much as it is information. And I learned a lot on the street
and it has made me successful. It has also been a limiting factor at times 'cause
you can't immediately apply the same characteristics and skills. You have to sometimes
weaponize them differently. And I've done that through wisdom and age.
So my last question in the section on poverty, homelessness, and abuse.
What should adults who encounter or work with homeless children or youth know?
What would you want them to know if they were to encounter you when you were a 10
-year -old, 8 -year -old, 11 year old, 12 year old? I want them to do two things.
One, we have to talk about this topic. You know, outside of our immediate circle of
maybe our therapist and our loved one, I don't think enough people involved in the
system talk about it to their communities other than the crazy moments. And I think
we need to do a lot more dialogue to make it central to our conversation. 8 .4
million kids live in abject poverty in this country. And yet, not since 1999, in a
presidential debate, has anyone said the word child poverty? There are thousands of
coal workers, coal miners, who get talked about all the time. But the 8 .4 million
children don't have a constituency, they don't vote, they don't have political power.
The only people we have, or the folks like you just asked about, is the people
doing the work. And we need these frontline workers to take on get another task,
which is to central this in our conversation. One on one, first and foremost,
I think you need to take care of yourselves before you can take care of others. I
always love that, you know, when the plane is going to go down and you have to
drop your mask on, put yours first. I think what I see and experience firsthand and
through my own advocacy, folks burn out, really good people burn out. And we need
people to stay as they gain experience, not leave. So take care of yourself. B,
not every single moment is a crisis. And I often only interacted with my workers or
people who were involved with me when the proverbial shit was hitting the fan. And
I didn't have relationships with these people outside of that context. And because I
was a relatively, quote, good kid, I was often just ignored or overlooked or spoken
to just before court. So I would say try and work with your folks outside of
context of a court date or a crisis to the extent you can. To the extent you can.
I mean, I talked with a worker not long ago and I think she would have said like
18 to 20 kids. Oh my gosh. And I'm like, what do we, honestly, what do we expect?
Now let's move into the foster care part because you're getting there. So, eventually
around the age, I think it was the age of 12, it's up to this point you had been
protecting your mom or you had been fearful of child welfare and your mother had
certain or foster care and your mother had certainly instilled that fear in you.
Your brother had you and your sister helped him plot and escape. So,
he had gotten out And you made a decision after one horrible event that whatever
foster care was, it had to be better than what you were currently living through.
And you also, I think, realized that you would be killed if you stayed. That her
middle illness was such that you were not going to survive it. So you reported her,
which had to be terrifying. And you weren't sure that they were going to take you
away, which made it all the more terrifying, but they did. And so your thought, of
course, was, okay, finally, I am not going to be abused. I am not going to be
homeless. I'm not going to be hungry. But that is not your story. So as much as
those of us who train and support foster parents want to believe
that there are happy endings and there are, of course, but they're not all. So tell
us your foster care story. I think you were 12 when you finally reported and they
finally started believing you. - I entered foster care. My social worker told me
years later that I was the first kid she saw to be excited about being detained
and I was. My mom had nearly killed me again,
and which precipitated the last interaction that sent us into the system. And I was
initially placed in delinquency facilities due to my sexual orientation, which is no
longer the case. But it was the case for me where as many of your listeners will
know, but if the public is listening as well, basically kids are ranked and
different placements are able to take different rankings. So, if you think of 1
through 10, someone at the scale of 10 might have, you know, physical disabilities
that require around the clock care, for instance, well, I was a queer kid. That was
a 10 as well. And so, there was very few placements that were qualified. So I
ended up in a delinquency facility that was violent, it was an inappropriate
placement. I was assaulted quickly and repeatedly. There was very little
There was there was zero care for the affirmation of my sexual orientation or
understanding it The system diagnosed me through a battery of tests that kids go
through as gender identification Disorder which was used at the time to talk about
queer kids and my social work even said to me dropping me off I'll get you out of
here. You don't belong here, which said everything
after a period of time there I eventually made my way to a foster placement where
my brother and sister were
represented in the foster care system. I mean, depending on how you, what statistics
you're going for, I mean, what statistics you're reading, approximately 5 % of the
general population identifies as LGBTQ plus, that's not a firm number, but
approximately 30 % of the youth in care identify as LGBTQ plus.
And not only that, but their placement disruptions are up to one and a half to two
times greater. So that I throw that out there because your experience is not
unusual. Now, I didn't mean to interrupt because after you stayed, your caseworker
left you at the juvenile detention facility, which was just violent for a number of
months. And then take up the story there. Yeah, and those stats are super important.
And my treatment did not end. That's why the punctuation mark was really what you
said. But the the foster mom I was put into with my brother and sister, you know,
blue collar folks in a rural location that had way too many kids and were poorly
suited to be foster parents. The home was abusive in many ways.
I was kept from school at times to be rented out for labor. They were petty and
violent, multiple kids at a basement. - They withheld food as a form of punishment.
- More for me, it was the foster mom in particular thought I was quote,
unquote, "mouthy." And so I think one of her tactics to make me less mouthy, and
she also said I was obese and girly, which May have been true at the feminine
characteristics. I don't know but that I was not and The food thing was really
about control when you're starving You don't have much energy to do much else
including think so it was From hunger and starvation as a homeless person because of
absence to being at home with plenty and Petty cruelty and just I'll tell more
about this home and these others but I when I left I was so emaciated that it was
you know part of my recovery to Reacquaint myself with food. I Stayed there for a
bit. My brother and sister again ran away and left me I have all the love in the
world for them. They were children We were in a violent situation and they had The
ability because of unique circumstances of a separate school where they went to sneak
away one day and they did and I'm glad they did but I was left in the home after
that even though it was investigated and found to be All the things accused by my
brother and sister were true. I've still left there the
Emotional in particular manipulation of violence just escalated as did the physical,
and the horrible treatment for my sexual orientation was just brutal. And I
eventually made my way into the custody of a woman who had been for a brief moment
my boss, the YMCA, as a volunteer. And she was not a foster mom, and she had
fought for, I learned later, more than a year with lawyers to try and get me,
having seen what I was going through in this home, but was successful. Well,
when I reached my limit in this other home and they had hit me for the last time,
I made very clear I was not going to go back there and I was ultimately allowed
to move in with this family who had gone from one child to three in the span of
a month. She had just had a child, she had had a previous one and they took me
in and they got an emaciated emotionally, you know, Damage, say the least and to my
social workers credit, you know, she gave them the space I don't think these folks
wanted a high -touch social worker I think Holly my foster mom was a trained,
you know, youth person who worked the YMCA in a capacity as such and My social
worker, well, I actually love my social worker But one of them gave me really good
advice about at every step of my way with this family. Holly rebuilt me from
Rubble, and I did relatively well there. In the book,
I only talk about three or four placements. I had many, many, many others. And the
reason I only talk about three or four is because this is a book for the general
public. And I wanted to give examples. But Holly and Steve ultimately weren't able
to care for me for the entire time. I moved out of their custody into a series of
other homes. But during that time, I was excelling at school for the first time in
my life. I got braces, which were physically very necessary. I had all sorts of
long -term issues that were addressed with regards to my health. And I realized
during this time that I wanted to do something about foster care. And it was during
this early time when I was in Holly and Steve's home that I began to get involved
in child advocacy, which included being part of the group that advocated for and
successfully so got the first state tuition waivers from community college colleges in
Massachusetts, which then went on to the federal level. And I got more and more
involved in this work. I think it's something that foster kids do, which is it
looks for, we look for love and approbation from external actors, and in doing this
work, I found myself getting that recognition. So I did more of it, and I loved it
too. - This is when you were a teen. - Mm -hmm, still in foster care. Ultimately,
I went back to Holly and Steve's after hiatus, and it was fine,
they're loving, they're very much in my life, but I realized when I was 16,
I had to get out of the system. And it wasn't the most abusive moment of my time
in the system. And you know, Holly and Steve did not abuse me at all. They loved
me. But it was the whole experience was crushing me. And so I decided to
emancipate. And I imperfectly did that by hook and crook a little bit.
I don't want to give that away, but they can read the book. And I ended up
homeless briefly and then went on through a grant to study in the north of Spain.
Which you're like, "What? I know. It's bizarre." But I wanted housing,
healthcare, and food. And I needed to get out of the state custody because my soul
was slowly being extinguished from interviews and bad therapy and poor people and a
system that kept trying to kill me. And I just wanted to be out of it. You're not
alone, as you know. No, I know. Yeah, it's, you know, it's, and even though it may
not be the most logical, if you think from, well, there's more support, if there
is, there's more education, there's more. At some point, - Yeah.
- Now you. - You just, yeah. - I had to cut ties and I ended up living in the
north of Spain with a wonderful host mother in a rural village in the wine country
in the base of the Pyrenee Mountains in a place called La Rioja, or Pais Vasco. I
didn't speak any Spanish and she taught me Spanish and she's a loving,
mountain, Basque woman who took the work that Holly and Steve began and really
because of the way I was in a foreign country, not speaking the language, everyone
giving me more patience and love because of it. I was able to accelerate my healing
and my reconstruction. She was a wonderful, she is, I'm still very much in touch
with her, Gabriela. And from Spain, I applied to colleges. And it was funny about
applying to colleges is I would attach this letter to the applications and be like,
as you'll notice, I'm missing half my high school transcript, and as you'll notice,
I didn't exactly graduate, as you'll notice, I don't have $65 to pay.
And all of these schools were like, well, if you don't have money, so they sent me
back my package to the north of Spain. If you just think about that for a second,
they, and it was for one to the fee, nothing else. And the And one of the
colleges, there's a few, but Vassar admitted me. And their policy was,
we'll admit you, and then we'll figure out your financial aid, and we'll make sure
you can come. And that changed my life. Yet again, Vassar opened up so many doors
to me in so many ways. I kept coming back to them with the unique circumstances of
foster care. My first semester, I went to buy the books and the school book lady,
I handed her my student ID, the bookstore, and she's like, "Why are you handing me
this?" I'm like, "For school books." She's like, "Oh, no, no, you need your parents'
credit card." - In my dreams. - I'm like, "Uh, yeah,
I need my parents a lot." So I constantly ran into these weird moments where I
just was, I was so angry because I got all this way. You know, like the first
time the dorms closed, I slept in my car until I scraped enough money for a hotel.
I had to work all these jobs, which really put a strain on me academically to keep
up my GPA for my scholarships, which are a GPA. I mean, and then on top of it,
just culturally, what was around me was an incredible level of wealth and privilege
that I wanted to belong to, but I absolutely did not belong to. You know,
folks would invite me to sushi. I remember that I was like, "What the hell is
sushi?" And then I'd go, and then I would just be like, "No, I'm full, I'm not
hungry." I was starving, but I couldn't afford to contribute. And all the kids had
complained about the food in the cafeteria, and I'd be like, "In my heart," I'm
like, "This is amazing." So just the casual consumption and the cultural assumptions
that folks had were just such an anasema to me that I didn't know how to quickly
adapt. I learned to and I have good friends from college, but it took a minute and
I had people in my life. I had this woman who I met was basically like a pseudo
foster parent. She sent me socks and underwear. When I got an internship at the
White House during college, she got me an apartment and it was unfurnished and it
was in a rough part of town, but I would not have been able to go. So There are
people in my life that helped me. - How did you meet her? Where did she come into
your life? - Shh, she was a volunteer. When I went down to DC again and again as
part of this group that I co -founded called the National Foster Youth Advisory
Council. And then later on, I was part of something to stop trying to cure gay
kids in care with trial welfare league and the joint initiative with Lambda Legal. I
kept going to DC. And I was so lucky to go through media training many times with
the same individual, and she is the woman. She's in the book, her name is Tamar,
who became my pseudo -adopted foster parent during college. And even today,
she's helping me get pressed for my book. But at the time, she was in media
training, she was communications for nonprofits. But there's these individuals like
that. And flashing back just for a quick second, you know, there was this church
that we slept in when we were homeless, and we met these parishioners there, one of
the deacons. When I got to Vassar, I looked him up. I sent him a letter to the
church, and I thanked him because they're these angels. How did you remember?
Because you probably were 12, but so they were an angel, They were a bright shining
light, that's how I guess. - There are these moments when you touch that, people
call God or the universe and generosity at moments kept me alive. And it wasn't
just like I was starving, like they sent me to summer camp. And there are moments
of renewal when you see this thing that could be and it inspires you and it
nourishes your soul to be like, okay, I'm gonna get there when you see it and
you're able to live in it. And they put the three of us in summer camp for a
week. But it was like the most blissful week of my childhood. And then I wanted,
they always were in my heart. And there's a bunch of people like this. And I
reached out, actually sent a letter to a teacher too. I reached out, I sent a
letter to the church, dressed them, they wrote me, and then they started sending me
a check at the beginning of a semester for $120 to help me defray the costs. And
was that enough? No, it was like two textbooks. But was I grateful to the depth of
my soul? And I'm still in touch with them. They're beautiful people. So-- - What did
you say in the letter? I just want you to know that I am here, I am doing well,
thank you, or what did you say? - I expressed gratitude, you know. I said,
I don't know if you remember us. And, you know, they wrote back and they're like,
of course I remember you. And it's funny because something, you know, what some
people have said to me is like, why don't they remove you from your mother's
custody? They go immediately to the, why didn't you, why didn't you? And I stopped
that because I don't ask people to do what's impossible for them. I asked them to
do what they can do. And not what I want them to do because that's just not
realistic. they instead decided this is what they could do. And thank God for it.
So I wanted to express my gratitude. I have done that throughout my entire life,
even like during college, but ever since then, we don't do enough of that.
And I constantly try and do that. And I like to write it. And these folks are
still in my life. I mean, not in a big way, but every year we exchange
correspondence and holiday greetings and birthday. But that's one of the ways I got
through Vassar. I worked jobs. I applied for random scholarships. And then I started
working on reform. Like, Chafee was one of the first bills I worked on to provide
transition age youth resources. But then there were these other things, like, when
you apply for financial aid, you have to prove you don't have parents.
On the FASFA form, how do you prove a negative? And the truth is,
you do have a parent. But how do you prove that this parent is is is incapable is
not supporting you is unless I guess if her parental rights were terminated but
still yeah. Anyway, so college was an amazing time. I got to do some incredible
experiences. It was also a place where I renewed and continued growing. I stayed
very much in child welfare reform in all sorts of ways. I sort of came out as I
got to get more and more work done on this, this movement to stop trying to cure
gay kids. And then I worked on other things like how do we get the fostered voice
to the table to make better law? How do we stop demonizing the parents so that
they, if they're going to be renewed, most foster kids get put back with their
families. Well, that is the goal of foster care is to. That's the goal. Yes. And
some people would say it's, I don't know. Some people say that there is no perfect
answer. Some people say that children are put back into bad situations. On the other
hand, we would like to believe that children are going to do better if we could.
The ultimate thing is do we can we support these families so that they can care
for the kids. And of course, as you're well aware now, the big push and has been
for a while, but certainly after the Family First Act is to rather than it was to
put children with extended family as opposed to unrelated foster care.
What are your thoughts on that and curiosity as both an advocate and as a person
who, as a former foster youth, I'm curious. I've understood that two -thirds of the
kids entering foster care are for neglect.
Neglect is a euphemism for poverty. So we are in many times, many respects.
So we are breaking up families. - Well, for drug abuse, to be honest. Neglect is
often sometimes that parents are not capable of parenting because they are suffering
from substance abuse disorder. But go ahead, I didn't mean to interrupt. - Correct.
Now it's important, and I'm talking to probably an audience of experts, so I'm glad
you clarified. But truthfully, even if it's, let's say, half of that, there is a
large number of folks entering the system because of poverty. Absolutely. And drug
use sometimes is related, but even aside from the drug use part, if we can remove
some of the pressure on the system by perhaps supporting the parents by not taking
away their kid, we can remove the pressure on the system to focus on the kids that
do need to be in it for serious reasons. I also am often deeply concerned that the
condition of the way that kids are constantly subject to the whims of the parents
compliance. So what do you explain that? I understand what you mean but I want you
to explain it. Sure. Yeah you know often I felt like whether or not my mom was
compliant with the plan that she often seemed to just deviate from all the time
year after year after year would determine the course of my life. And six months in
a life in the 12 year old is a substantial part of their life. So the older I
got, the more chances my mom had, the more I was like, what is going on? So I do
think there is an appropriate tendency to covet the power of the state to break up
families. And I think we should be judicious and also acknowledge we're moving kids
for poverty reasons and we should not do that, which would relieve it. Concurrent
all that for the kids in the system, they're not property. And I feel like our
body of law treats children as the property of their parents. And it is threaded
throughout. People talk about the best interest of the child, but they're often not
what is determinative in the courtroom. It's the parents' rights to the child or the
parents' compliance with acts. Yeah, you're spot -on. I mean, it's, and yet,
we, as you say, we don't want to be removing children. And we know that poverty
often is, that neglect is often, you know, shrouded in poverty or that the two are
connected. And so we don't want to, so should we be removing? It's so, it's so but
you're spot on that that from the child's perspective, particularly in a case with a
and your case was not at all. And well, maybe it was unusual. I don't know. But
the in your case, your mother wasn't going to be able to. She had a mental illness
that was never going to where her parental rights ever terminated. They were not.
That's interesting. There was movements at various times, You know, I think each case
is unique, but the overall status a little, I think, I think we are coming to
terms with the fact that kids are better off with their families. However, that's in
part because we've underfunded the system to the point where we're like, "Look, it's
so terrible. "It's terrible because social workers "should have four kids, period.
"They should have four kids. "They should earn a base dollar or $150 ,000. "I don't
care where they live. they should get free taxes. - Okay, right now the entire
audience is standing up applauding you and foster parents should be paid, you know,
well. - Well, my afterward, I say foster families should have their kids go to state
colleges or any college that accepts federal financial aid, which is all of them,
should have to put foster families, biological children for free through school after
five years of good service. - Okay, you're nominated for Sainthood now, go ahead. But
it's the moral and economic thing to do. We need to have the best people working
in the system. We can pay now, or we can pay more later. And the bill later is
not just economic. It is the moral reprehensible nature of the fact that we just
endlessly pass on poverty to these kids, to their, from their parents, to them, to
their grandkids. I say this thing when I talk and speeches.
- So true. - More foster kids will become homeless than go to college. More foster
kids will die within the year of leaving foster care than go to college. - And
sexual traffic, I don't know that stat, but sexual trafficking of children coming out
of foster care. - Especially girls, yeah. - And boys, but yeah. - Are we okay with
that? If we're not, there's a blueprint in my afterward for how we fix that. And I
look at the four pillars in my mind, which are social workers and biological
families as well as the kids and then the public. And we have to address all those
things. And there's very low hanging fruit. I'm always people like, how do you get
more foster parents? Why are middle class people not fostering? Because they're
worried about college savings, pension and healthcare. For example, let's make them
federal employees. We need about 10 ,000. What is 10 ,000 more workers in this
country's federal pension system. We can incentivize people to do it.
However, social workers, all of these folks like social workers, there's different
classes, there's different agents involved. The public just constantly sees the dead
baby story and then condemn an entire class of people who are doing this work. And
it's not just the financials that I talk about. We have to honor these people as
the heroes. They are doing the war on poverty, which we never won and We're still
fighting and I see people celebrate Veterans Day I'm like when is social work day
and our country's mind never And yet my sister a social worker She every day should
be her damn day. I did her taxes one year I'm like where why are you spending so
much money on your kids and I don't mean her biological? You know And not every
one of them is the same. I didn't have great ones, but what profession is. But at
the end of the day, we need them to be fully supported to do this work.
That means, what can we do to ameliorate churn? What can we do to support them
emotionally, et cetera? Churn is huge. And we know that a turnover and a caseworker
is significantly correlated to a poor outcome for the children in their care. The
children in the case load, and that's a big deal. People find out about podcasts
from other people, i .e. word of mouth, and that is the best way that you want to
help this podcast and the nonprofit creating a family. The best thing you can do is
tell your friends and families about the podcast and why you like it and how you
found it. So the podcast is called creatingafamily .org. Let's talk about adoption and
foster care. So please let your family and friends know about it so we continue to
grow. Thank you.
So if what words would you give to foster parents from as somebody who grew up in
the system. What would you want foster parents to know?
So I constantly felt, in foster homes, I'm not talking about delinquency facilities
or group homes, you know, look, it's a bit of an arranged marriage, isn't it? And
we're thrust into each other's homes with very little consent. Well, in your case,
no consent at all as a child. Yeah. And even If you're consulted as a kid often
the case is such that there's not enough placements you're going to go to this
home. So you're receiving someone who is essentially being placed in your home with
very little say in that. How would you feel? And then this is probably not your
first home. So you carry all this baggage and then you're in a home that may or
may not share your values. However you want to define that and /or have a different
religion. I've been converted to every religion and foster care could possibly
imagine. And then you're thrown into a different school. And by the way,
that's gonna happen a couple of times in your life. So, and then the part that
also was particularly galling was act like a child. I heard that so often.
And they meant different ways like go play or go make friends or go this,
I had no skill set to do any of those things. - You hadn't been a child ever.
- You had been a protector of your mother, you had been holding together one of the
family, yeah. - So, and I also experienced things that adults don't experience. I've
seen dead bodies. I've been like, you know, the frontline of the AIDS epidemic in
the New York City in the '80s, living in, so the whole concept of this idea of
like flip on a light switch and go be a kid is absurd. And so I don't know what
the answer is from a parenting perspective because each case is so unique. Each kid,
each, each family unit, however we define that is going to be different. But I
would say realize that you're dealing with a imperfect human that does not
necessarily have the cognitive capabilities of acting like an adult, but in very many
respects.
- Exactly, but both at the same time. And that inconsistency, that friction is where
a lot of pain points come in. So permission to do this or that, it's like, oh,
we're teaching them discipline. No, it's kind of condescending and dehumanizing. So I
go from caregiver in my family to I have to ask permission to go in the fridge.
Or these things, you're like, wait a minute, I led my family and everyone's now
trying to harm me into this other personality. And then at school, it's just this
complete culture shock. You know, you're basically going through boot camp all of a
sudden, like in Fort Bragg and you're in boot camp. So I think a lot of,
I'm a foster dad. I know lots of great foster families and foster parents. And I
think the practice has changed substantially since I was a kid. But I would say,
what would I want them to know? I think one of the hardest parts for me was I I
couldn't undo the life I had led to that point and I couldn't forget it or leave
it behind and there was never any space for that in the homes where I was other
outside of the therapy room so I don't know what the right answer is in every
single situation but I think in embracing the kids experience the young person's
experience would have been very healthy for me. Why did you become a foster dad? Oh
My god, I never intended to everyone always says Not not people in the field that
outside the field. Oh, that's great And the underlying thing about that is there's
this thing like oh, well you are one of course you won You know how to do it
children. Yeah foster children do not owe a bill For what was done to them and I
always point it out and people say it's real like - No, no, no, no, no. You are
as liked and as responsible for being a foster parent as I am. - Yes, yes. - I
push back on that. And the other thing that always bothers me, not that you ask
this, but I'll just say this to your folks, I'd love to get people's feedback.
People ask me, how long was your son with you? I find it offensive. When my
brother and sister had kids, biological children, from the moment they met their
child, they were in love. And It doesn't matter if it was six minutes, six months,
six years or 16 years. So my son came into my life as a mentee. My sister ran
something, I like to think of it as like kids with high potential or potentially
queer kids, both populations. You said he came in as a what? Mentee. Mentee.
Mentee. I thought you said manatee and I'm going, I don't even, I'm not even sure
what that means. Okay. So I'm sorry. So your sister ran a program for High
achieving? Very informal. High achieving and /or queer.
And she basically kids in her, her kind of, her view, not just on her caseload,
but her area she supervised. She would connect them to me. And I would do a ton
of months. And I would, I would basically interview them, kind of figure out what I
could do. And I try and connect them to resources or people or programs. And this
young man came into my office and he, in so many respects,
was me when I came into Holly's life. I saw intelligence, I saw wit,
I saw a lot of pain and an unbelievable amount of potential. And so mentorship
became more and more and more. And at the time I was married and he just came
into our lives and it was very clear, well at least to me, it was very clear that
this was exactly what it needed to be. He's doing great. He went on to go to
Berkeley and he's at Cornell doing a PhD in artificial intelligence. He's got three
great brothers. They don't live with me, but I'm very close there. I love them very
much as happens. Many of your people listening know this is the scenario and I've
worked with them too, but to the less extent and My son is the best thing that
ever happened to me He is the love of my life and is ultimately a big genesis of
my ultimate healing Of my own childhood trauma was because in order to help him I
had to help myself as I as I said you asked me what my advice is for social
workers I Needed to take care of myself and I thought I had but that was not
true. And he demanded that of me as only children can do.
I want to thank what I think is probably our longest partnership, our longest
sponsor of this podcast and that's Children's Connection. They are an adoption agency
providing services for domestic infant adoption and embryo donation and adoption
throughout the U .S. They also provide home study and post -adoption support to
families in Texas and they have believed in our mission as a organization almost
from the beginning and we truly could not do what we have done without their
support. Thank you Children's Connection.
So last question why did you name the book A Place Called Home? You know I start
the book homeless because for 12 years of my life I was and I thought what I
wanted was a home and then I had tens and tens and tens of homes. Be careful what
you wish for. No it ultimately was what I realized was it's the my home is not a
physical place. My home is the belief that I have lived, the life that I have
lived, that I have been put put through what I've been put through and had the
chances and opportunities to make me a tool to apply those to help kids like me.
So that kids that come after me do not have this experience, the good, the bad,
the ugly. And that is my home. That is my mission. And that is what gives me
fire. That is what makes me feel like I'm alive. And that is inside of me. And I
realize that in this a long journey of a place called home. I had it all along.
- Well, on that beautiful note, thank you, David Ambrose, author of A Place Called
Home. Thank you for being with us today. I have, I enjoyed the book immensely. I
recommend it. It is, you will finish the book feeling uplifted and the afterward is
worth the book as well. Worth the cost just to read the afterward. So there,
that's a tease. You gotta get the book to do it. All right. Thank you.