Things You Should Know About Foster Care: A Series From A Social Workers Perspective
- Ebone Kimber, LMSW
- Jan 19, 2018
- 3 min read
I.AM. ANGRY.
I got a phone call from a kid today, excuse me, young adult who just recently aged out of foster care. He is ALREADY HOMELESS due to a string of unfortunate situations that were all manifested by his lack of knowledge on how to have a back up plan when life hits hard. So I called my back up, you know helping professionals in high positions who are "always there" and tell you to "let me know if you need anything", takes one look at the file and says oh they did everything they possibly could do for him.
Blank. stare.
Okay so just to refresh my memory, the goal is to prevent foster youth from having to deal with these statistics. And I can't give a whole lot of details past this because well you know the truth is I don't like talking about my kids lives unless they give me permission, but they prepared him for basically nothing! It's like if my parents raised me up until I graduated high school, moved me into the dorm, gave me $1,000 dollars, bought me furniture for my dorm and some food and left me and said good luck. NO phone call, check in, can't call for extra dollars in my bank account for food, NO visits home for the holidays.
Give me a freaking break, in my eyes they did NOTHING! But I am "taboo" because I truthfully believe this. I am "too harsh" and need to "cut social workers some slack." And I am going to be perfectly honest, I probably know this kid's social workers and I think they are awesome people, but as a fellow social worker who thinks outside the box, I am so sad, sad for them because they think they helped this kid, sad for them because the "big boss" thinks they helped this kid and MOST OF ALL sad for this kid because everyone think they helped except for the fact that this kid might end up on the streets after Christmas. So, yeah. Success = 0.00000000000
And this comes after a great success this weekend after providing over 200 foster kids with knowledge about resources, how they can advocate for themselves and just an outlet. So much good stuff happened and then....this... the reality that there is SO much work to be done. Let me drop some numbers:
So the difficulty with working with youth in foster care is oftentimes they don't want to be identified so 1) It's hard to get data from them and 2) That means this data is old and 3) That means this data only tells part of the story. But I want you to have an idea of what we are talking about because honestly social workers, teachers, counselors, psychiatrists, directors, and powers that be say they do, but they don't get the same phone calls I get so often. I'm frustrated, but I am not discouraged. It starts with the conversation and that...is what Pro Dev with EK is all about. If you have any more questions about foster care, feel free to comment or send me an email at prodevwithek@gmail.com. You can also follow me on all the typical platforms.
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