Henrico woman leads foster care effort

Jessica Stern was 10 years old when her mother died of breast cancer, leaving a husband and eight children.

Only weeks later, with the family’s home on the brink of foreclosure, Stern’s father moved from their Ohio hometown to Florida to take a new job and try to re-establish a life.

While the children were taken in and fostered by various neighbors and relatives, and Stern and three siblings later joined their father in Florida, life was never the same.  When the school year started shortly after all the upheaval and loss, Stern remembers being shell-shocked.

“I couldn’t concentrate; I had no focus,” she recalls.  She has never forgotten the feeling of being unmoored and almost like an alien among her peers from intact families.

But she has also never forgotten the kindness of the people who rose to the occasion and helped out.

One woman answered a plea in the church bulletin to help the family, and took her shopping for back-to-school clothes.

“The community really stepped up,” she says. “This is what small-town people do.”

Information easily lost
Despite numerous financial and emotional struggles, Stern, now a Henrico citizen, managed to obtain a college degree, and spent the next decades building a life and career – trying her best to put her chaotic childhood years behind her.

Then she met Dr. Jennifer Jacobs.

A former White House Fellow and West Point graduate, Jacobs had been recently involved in leading teams of analysts seeking to improve complex systems within the federal government.

Over lunch, the two discussed the overwhelming problems of the nation’s foster care system – in particular, its fragmentation and lack of coordination, as well as its inability to handle the vast and growing number of children.  The record-keeping processes that track those 400,000-plus children tend to be outdated and piecemeal, as well.

“None of the information is cloud-based, so it is easily lost,” Stern points out.  “I once talked to a 35-year-old man who was born and raised in the system – and abused in every home.  After living in 12 different foster homes, he ran away at the age of 14, and no one noticed he was gone.  He spent his teen years and early twenties homeless.”

It’s little wonder, Stern says, that many foster children struggle academically or act up in school and at home.  In fact, foster children suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) at twice the rate of returning combat veterans.

“A lot of people think the kids are bad – that it’s their fault,” Stern says, noting that foster children frequently suffer from a sense of shame about their circumstances.

She quotes a former foster child who ended up in the system because her parents were incarcerated.  “I felt like I was [the one] in prison,” she told Stern, “and paying for the sins of my parents.”

‘Unacceptable’
Out of Jacobs’ and Stern’s conversation grew the inspiration to establish an initiative that will provide social workers with improved technology to help secure better outcomes for foster children.

Co-founded by Stern and Jacobs, the new nonprofit, Connect Our Kids, is launching a nationwide, grassroots campaign this month to raise awareness of foster children’s needs and funds for the technology to help them find permanent families.

The campaign, known as “Give BIG America,” is led by ambassadors around the country.  In Jessica’s home state of Ohio, the Connect Our Kids fundraising effort is led by her foster father, Mike Lhamon.

Locally, Henricus Historical Park has joined the effort to raise awareness, and will host a special event Nov. 18.  Foster children and their families will be admitted free that day to attend “Affairs of the Hearth,” an opportunity to explore 17th-century cooking in the daily life of colonists, English soldiers and Virginia’s Native Americans.

In Washington, D.C., Burke & Herbert Bank has teamed with the Washington Capitals hockey team to launch “Scores for Kids.”  The bank is donating $100 to Connect Our Kids for every goal scored by the Caps in the 2017-2018 regular season.

To Jacobs and Stern, the fundraising represents a much-needed first step in the push to update and improve foster care technology.  The campaign’s call to action asks that people across the country donate $6 or more to help build software that can be piloted in two states.

American taxpayers spend over $9 billion annually on the foster care system – a system that was overburdened even before the opioid epidemic. With increasing numbers of families decimated by opioid abuse, foster care programs are strained to the breaking point.

Every year, 20,000 children age out of the system without finding permanent families; by the age of 26, two-thirds of those will have been homeless, incarcerated, addicted, or deceased.

“We find these numbers unacceptable,” says Jacobs, who calls the foster care system one of the country’s most urgent social problems.  “But everyone has the opportunity to be a part of the solution.”

“Too many people don’t want to talk about the problems of broken families – or about the innocent children left suffering in their wake, Stern says. “We’re a judgmental society,” she laments.  “There’s so much shame surrounding dysfunctional families.”

“But the American people have the power to fix this,” she continues, “and build the tools needed to connect these kids to a better life.

“We just need to make our children our priority.”

For details about how to join the Give BIG America campaign, visit ConnectOurKids.org.  For free-admission coupons to Henricus on Nov. 18, foster families should contact their local social services office.