(Ed. note: no news locally, but here is an article from The Washington Post this morning that I think is very pertinent, considering that a large number of foster youth end up homeless once they “graduate”. It is behind a paywall, so if you want the full text contact me at dsimonson@mac.com)
The Washington Post
Podcast gives former foster youths a voice. They have lots to discuss.
“These are some conversations we wish we had earlier,” says the host on “Self-Taught.” Episodes cover tough issues that teens in foster care systems often face.
The podcast host’s backdrop is her bedroom wall in California, decorated with a blue, tie-dyed curtain and an arc of purple hearts on the wall. Kat McKeon leans toward the camera, greets the other people appearing in the corners of the screen and says, “Let’s jump right in.”
For the next 30 minutes, the group will have an exceptionally candid conversation, speaking to one another and listeners about the closed, largely invisible world in which they once lived for months if not years.
“I have lived in places where I wasn’t really wanted.”
“You can’t even go up the street to get a bag of chips. So how do you know how to do that in your adult life?”
“I can fit in anywhere, but I don’t belong anywhere.”
The host and her guests are former foster care youths, who departed the system only when they aged out starting on their 18th birthdays.
Dozens of podcasts are aimed at foster parents, social workers and child welfare experts trying to reform the nation’s beleaguered system, which covers nearly 400,000 children and adolescents. But the California-based “Self-Taught” is the rare effort by and for the young people at the center of it all, who are among the nation’s most vulnerable populations.
“You grow up in this family that’s already turbulent,” Emilio Valladolid says at one point. “Then you are shot into a system and don’t have any real peer support.”
In states across the country, the system has been in crisis for years, overwhelmed and underfunded. Some states have such a shortage of foster parents that kids in need are sometimes sleeping in social workers’ offices, at motels or even in juvenile detention centers.
These troubled agencies, Valladolid and other podcast guests say, should be hearing from the people the system was designed to assist and protect. But because they are under 18, wards of the state and not allowed to speak to the outside world without a maze of permissions — let alone share what they feel would improve it — they typically feel they have little voice. They certainly have little chance at community.
The podcast is now streaming on YouTube, Spotify, Apple and other podcast channels. Cruz, who serves as an adviser of sorts, hopes to broaden its audience to also reach ages 12 to 16.
During both seasons, the unfiltered conversations have featured a diverse group of participants mostly in their 20s. Among them:Valladolid, who identifies as transgender and nonbinary,neurodivergent and Mexican American; Tamar Sebesta, who has Native American and Persian heritage; and Phillisha Kimbles, an African American who was about 8 when she began raising her own siblings.
Studies show foster youths are less likely to hold jobs as adults, more likely to become homeless, more likely to be sexually abused or to experience chronic trauma than their peers who stay with their parents.The podcast offers up some of these numbers while humanizing them with the person on the screen.
Later in the episode between McKeon and Kimbles, the conversation turns to why foster teens in particular need accurate information about sex and relationships. Each podcast often posts “show notes,” with details listing online resources for navigating health care, free trauma counseling sessions, free sex education and support groups for former foster youths.