Rise Senior Parent Leader Jeanette Vega and Child Welfare Organizing Project Program Director Joyce McMillan have been appointed to the new Foster Care Interagency Task Force created by a City Council bill passed in November 2016 to address the needs of children in foster care.
The 21-member task force task will focus on developing recommendations for improving services for children in foster care and outcomes for those aging out of the system. It includes leadership of … Read More
Five days before Christmas 2015, my two kids came home from foster care on trial discharge.
I was so ready for them to come back to me.
It was the first Christmas we’d spent together in two years, so it was special to us. I was lucky enough to have money to buy them gifts and make a nice dinner like we used to do every Christmas.
I wanted my kids to feel like we were a family … Read More
The grief parents suffer when they lose children to foster care and adoption is “invisible and often goes unacknowledged,” explains Toronto-based social worker Kathleen Kenny and parent advocate Sheryl Jarvis, who run a 15-week support group for women who use drugs and have experienced having one or more children removed or adopted.
Q: How would you compare the grief of a parent who loses a child to adoption to a parent whose child dies?
Jarvis: When a child … Read More
In 2013, I placed my oldest daughter in foster care because I didn’t know how to help her. She was 6 when she started to say that she hated me and her siblings and didn’t want to live with us anymore. One day, after I told her that she could have a piece of cake only after she did her homework, she said, “I hate you, Mommy,” and “I want to kill myself,” over and … Read More
Recently I had a chance to read the report “Expectant & Parenting Youth in Foster Care: Addressing their developmental needs to promote healthy parent and child outcomes” by Charlyn Harper Browne at the Center for the Study of Social Policy.
I became a mother while I was in foster care, and I found the report inspiring, relatable and informative. The report says that parents in the system and their children do best if the parents … Read More
