Posted on 29. Jul, 2010 by zmartin007 in Blog, Local, Media Coverage, Newsroom
Covenant continues to support Africa and their endeavor to provide Hope and Love to the orphan children that reside in that country, however this is a passion that we cannot fulfill on our own. We desperately need financial support to continue ministering to them and helping them succeed in fulfilling James 1:27. Please go to our Africa page and sponsor one of our children today, or purchase some of our coffee at www.covenantcoffee.org and all proceeds will find their way to those who need it most.
Posted on 27. Jul, 2010 by zmartin007 in Local, Newsroom
Holiday bash will help area foster kids
Rohrs, Sarah. Contra Costa Times, Dec. 10, 2009.
Kareena Blackmon, 21, of Vallejo was one of the lucky ones. After 14 years in foster care, she had a place to live and was college-bound when she was emancipated from the system.
But as they approach their 18th birthday, many teens about to age out of foster care face enormous hardships in finding work and housing, and in going to college, said Blackmon, a youth advocate for the county.
Teens in foster care who are 18 or older have needs all year, but they’re pronounced during holidays, said Blackmon and volunteers who help foster children.
“I want people to just be aware and try to help them to get into housing programs, employ them and get them enrolled in college,” Blackmon said.
To help brighten their holidays, two agencies have teamed up to throw a Holiday Bash, 4 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the American Canyon Community Center, 477 Canyon Creek Dr.
Donations are being sought to put on the bash and give each teen a gift for Christmas. At least 150 teens are expected.
“This is just a holiday Christmas party for this population that is usually forgotten about,” said Cynthia Grady of New Beginnings Supportive Services.
New Beginnings is staging the event with Alternative Family Services Solano Independent Living Skills Program, which contracts with Solano County to help teens make the transition to adulthood.
“There is a great need, especially during the holidays,” Living Skills Program Assistant Program Director Ella Bell said. “Without their biological families, they feel distant and withdrawn. We try to pull our resources together so that we can provide them with gifts and help them feel part of the community,” she added.
New Beginnings helps numerous young adults with food, diapers for their babies, formula, bus passes, clothing and other items. Efforts are also under way to open a transitional housing center for them.
Too often, Grady said, these young adults face homelessness and poverty when they leave foster care.
Further, nearly half the youth surveyed do not complete high school, nearly one-third have spent at least one night homeless, and about one-fourth sell drugs to support themselves, according to an Annie E. Casey Foundation Survey of former foster care youth.
Blackmon said she’s faced continuous challenges in the three years since she left foster care, including the need to suspend her college plans due to lack of transportation. She is also now guardian of her 18-year-old sister.
People can help with the Holiday Bash by making a cash contribution, donating gift cards, and providing household and clothing items, such as warm blankets, bed sheets and towels, Grady said.
Posted on 26. Jul, 2010 by zmartin007 in Blog, Local, Newsroom
The Fight to Make Well-Being a Foster Child’s Right
Daniel Heimpel, Huffington Post, Sept. 15, 2009.
In the twilight of his Presidency, George W. Bush signed The Fostering Connections to Success and Increased Adoptions Act of 2008, marking a fundamental shift in the priorities of Child Welfare in this Country. On Tuesday a subcommittee of the Congress’ Committee on Ways and Means will convene to discuss the law’s lagging implementation.
For the past three years, I have been a mentor and friend to two 18-year-old boys who both spent much of their childhoods in LA County’s rambling foster care system.
Roughly 4,000 foster youth age out of California’s foster care system every year. For most their 18th birthday is not so much a day of celebration as one of total isolation. Already separated from their biological families by death or abuse or neglect, at 18 the system turns most out — leaving many with only frazzled wits to face an uncertain future.
Fostering Connections offers states matching funds to extend foster care till 21 and has placed requirements on the public Child Welfare departments across the country to notify kin if a child is taken into state custody, increase efforts to keep siblings together, enhance health care standards and keep kids from bouncing from school to school even if they are bouncing from group home to foster home and back again.
Until Fostering Connections, Child Protective Services’ overriding priority was making sure children were saved from abuse, neglect and dangerous living conditions. What the law makes clear is that safety is — in and of itself — an insufficient goal, and compels foster care agencies to do what they have never been legally mandated to do before: provide foster children lasting connections with loving adults and increase their overall well-being.
Despite the importance of this law, ossified state and county departments of child protective services have done little to see it implemented and states that have gone as far as draft implementation legislation have been railroaded by a buckling economy.
For the young men I know, provisions like extension of care can be the difference between the abject and the edifying. For John, whose case was terminated by the department on Christmas Eve of 2008, two months after his 18th birthday, life is out of control. Six months ago he left Los Angeles and his then six-month-old son to try anew with his sister in Montana. Four months later he had burned his bridges there and had impregnated his new girlfriend.
For Chris, who knows John from when they were both 15 years old and living in the same South Central group home, life is different because he was among one of a handful of foster youth who have their “emancipation” stayed, by entering into what are called transitional housing programs. Staying in the system has given him the housing and stability to successfully land a job at a fried chicken restaurant. On Wednesday I am taking him to get his driver’s license.
The difference for these two young men is that one was allowed to stay within the system while the other was forced to languish without.
If the federal law was a reality on the ground, every dollar states spend on supporting youth like Chris past his 18th birthday is matched by a dollar from the feds. But for states to receive the funds they need to pass implementation legislation. In California Speaker of the Assembly Karen Bass pushed through complicated and essential legislation to ensure the money.
Unfortunately the current budget crisis has put those funds on hold till 2011, though they were meant to flow in 2010. That means one more year that a young man like John isn’t afforded the same opportunity as his peer and friend Chris.
Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), who introduced the bill back in ’08, will hold a hearing on the law’s implementation tomorrow. The clear message to states during that hearing must be that while the economy has hampered efforts to speed implementation, the commitment to seeing it through cannot falter.
Otherwise John’s story will continue to be more common than Chris’.
Posted on 26. Jul, 2010 by zmartin007 in Blog, National, Newsroom
Letter to the Editor: Fostering Care
San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 19, 2009.
Like so many other state responsibilities, foster care fell by the wayside earlier this year while Sacramento fought over the budget. But the needs of foster children – our children – don’t disappear because of a recession, so we were pleased to see that several foster care bills were signed into law.
AB131 was sponsored by the Judicial Council of California and authored by Assemblywoman Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa. It would require parents who can afford it to reimburse the state for court-appointed counsel in a dependency case. Another Evans bill to receive the governor’s signature was AB154, which brings California in line with the federal Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act. The new law doubles financial incentives to adopt foster children who are older or have special needs.
But the governor should have signed Evans’ third bill, AB82. The bill would have established safeguards for foster children being prescribed psychotropic medications. Such medications can be dangerous. Ordinarily, a child’s parent would provide this kind of support.
It’s unfair that the governor has chosen to abdicate this responsibility for the children we’re raising collectively.
Posted on 26. Jul, 2010 by zmartin007 in Blog, Local, Newsroom, Uncategorized
Drop off day helps local foster youth
A donation drive and car wash helps local youth in Kern County’s foster system.
A drop off day was held Saturday morning for “CARENET” which is an organization that helps foster youth and families in the process of reunification.
The event was held at CARENET’s Building Blocks facility.
People were asked to donate or “drop off” items that can be used in a transition home; like clothes, appliances, or furniture.
The director of the program, Mark Williams, said getting donated items makes a big difference in the lives of these young adults.
“It’s important because if these pieces aren’t put in place like this, if things like this don’t happen, then there’s a high probability that the kids coming out of the system, they’re not going to make it,” said Williams.
If you missed Saturday’s Drop Off Day you can still make a donation at the Building Block facility located at 1801 Belle Terrace
Orphaned by war, disaster: World’s refugee children seeking more foster homes in the US
Posted on 23. Feb, 2010 by admin in National
HOLLISTON, Mass. (AP) — Hiding from merciless militiamen and trekking through unforgiving mountainous terrain, Madhel Majok escaped the mass slayings and genocide of the Sudan that killed his parents. The 9-year-old orphan fled to neighboring Kenya, where he then survived vigilante shellings on his crowded refugee camp.
Majok remained in limbo for eight years while waiting for any country to grant him refuge.
Now 17, Majok has found safety in a small New England enclave 30 miles west of Boston. He’s a star soccer player at Holliston High School, listens to Tupac and Biggie at his leisure and lives comfortably in a foster home, thanks to a federal program that matches refugee minors with American families.
“I like it. It’s peaceful… quiet,” said Majok, who wears American urban-style clothes and stays in a home with four other refugee Asian and African children. “Took me a long time to get here.”
The U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, which has 700 refugee children in foster care, has asked states to prepare to foster…{more}
Even with austere budget plan, California counts on federal funds
Posted on 14. Jan, 2010 by admin in Local
On Rough & Tumble, a popular California public policy Web site, the lead headline Saturday read: “Arnold to DC: Give Us The Money, Nobody Gets Hurt.”
The Golden State is racked with 12.3 percent unemployment and a budget shortfall of $20 billion, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) warned Friday of even deeper cuts to programs without $6.9 billion in new federal funds. In unveiling an austere budget proposal, he went a giant step further with the age-old state gripe about unequal distribution of federal dollars — actually writing the federal funds in as a budget stopgap.
Some administration officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill were skeptical that the federal government would provide a bailout to close California’s budget gap, partly because it would set off a cascade of
Fresno State program aids students who were in foster care
Posted on 08. Jan, 2010 by jvallejo in Local
In foster care, Kenyon Whitman changed families a half-dozen times before settling down with someone he now calls his grandmother.
That carousel of foster care could have destroyed any college ambition. But Whitman found another home at California State University, Fresno, where …(read more)
Teens aging out of the foster care system receive gifts of generosity at the holidays
Posted on 08. Jan, 2010 by jvallejo in National
South Florida Today featured a segment that many people are unaware of. Teens that are aging out of the foster care system can face many obstacles and challenges. With the struggling economy…(read more)
