Child advocate columns, Nov. 5, 2009

3312 Northside Drive Suite D-250 Macon, Georgia 31210
478-757-2661 478-757-2666 (fax) www.oca.georgia.gov

Office of the Child Advocate
Tom C. Rawlings, Child Advocate

55 Park Place, NE Suite 410
Atlanta, Georgia 30303
404-656-4200 404-656-5200 (fax) www.gacfr.oca.georgia.gov

"Raise Me Up"
by Tom C. Rawlings

With the support of Governor Perdue and many Georgia child advocacy organizations, the Division of Family and Children Services and Casey Family Programs of Seattle, Washington are partnering in a major campaign to raise public awareness of and involvement in the challenges facing children in foster care.
Georgia's "Raise Me Up" campaign, which you can learn more about at www.raisemeup.org, is our state's version of Casey's national effort to help abused and neglected children successfully navigate the many difficulties foster children face. We all know that children in foster care need good foster parents, but we must remember that they also need community support from mentors who can guide them; volunteers who can help teach them life skills; and adults who can show them that there is a good life beyond the harsh one they've experienced so far. The folks who developed the "Raise Me Up" campaign did so after seeing the unfortunate statistics prevalent among former foster children. Among them:1 Nationally, over 20,000 children "age out: of the foster care system each year without finding a permanent home; Twenty-five percent of foster children who "age out" of the system will experience homelessness within the first 18 months they are on their own; Over 250,000 inmates in our nation's prison system were once foster children. One source of these difficulties for former foster children is that kids in foster care don't always have the opportunity to learn the social and life skills and coping strategies that children usually learn at home. Beginning at a disadvantage, the children often come to foster care from dysfunctional families. Handled improperly, foster care can compound those disadvantages. As Robin Nixon of the National Foster Care Coalition told the Associated Press: "Foster care is a hypervigilant system -- focusing on safety and protection. . . . These young people, as they move into later adolescence, don't get to do the normal right-of-passage activities that actually prepare kids for adulthood -- getting a driver's license, working. . . . After an often disjointed adolescence, many leave the system at 18 unready for independence."2 The "Raise Me Up" campaign will bolster the work DFCS is already doing through its Independent Living Program and its new policies implementing the federal Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act. By raising awareness of the needs of these foster children and connecting those who want to help with organizations serving these children, we can help ensure that more children who enter foster care exit it as responsible, self-reliant young adults. Casey Family Programs' goal is that by 2020 we reduce our national foster care rolls by 50% and reinvest those funds in community services for this vulnerable population. We've already made great strides toward that goal here in Georgia, where our foster care population has declined by almost 40% since 2004. The "Raise Me Up" campaign helps us continue to serve these children wherever they are, by expanding the public's focus beyond foster care to the many other volunteer opportunities to serve abused and neglected children in their communities.

1Source: http://advocacy.fosterclub.com/news/no-kid-should-age-out-foster-care-alone-america 2 Source: http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/01/15/tough_times_often_await_youths_aging_out_of_foster_care_system/