DCFYI

We have finished reading Faces of Foster Care, written by DCFYI board member Lisa Aguirre. Lisa's book is a series of profiles of people she interviewed, mostly adults who were in foster care. (The others are adoptive parents or child welfare professionals.)

20 sincere, wholehearted and at times heartbreaking stories are written like mini memoirs and depict various opinions of foster care in the United States.

More broadly, Lisa's hope (and ours) is that the book will raise awareness about children in foster care and encourage others to get involved. At DCFYI we believe that not enough people know that there are teens in care who want adult support and adoptive families and that raising awareness means more teens could have adults in their lives.

One excerpt that resonated strongly given the work we do at DCFYI:

Although I am put together now, I aged out of foster care a mess and have overcome a lot. There was a whole, I would say, five to ten years of my life where there was a lot of trial and error, there were some successes and failures. After all of that, I have come to realize that every child needs a place to call home. For a long time I rejected having a family because I was so angry. You know, hate is a strong word, but I hated the word family, because there was nothing good about it to me. As I got older, though, I realized that I didn’t really hate families, I hated that I never had a family, and I hated that I had this deep need to be totally independent because of all that I had been through. What I didn’t realize until I got older is that family not only keeps you from being alone, it provides the support you need to be truly independent, too. You can have both within a safe family.

Read the book - dive into inspiring messages and find out how Schylar got his family.

We thank Lisa for generously giving all profits from the book to Family & Youth Initiative.

I read the profiles, each heartfelt, piercing and uplifting. Each 'face’ became most memorable in numerous and varied ways. I am honored to support these incredibly resilient young people on their journey to a happier life.

-Friend of FYI

Excellent! Quick read. Eye opening. Learned a lot about the foster care system through reading these ‘mini-memoirs’. Heart-wrenching in parts, as you can imagine, but overall an upbeat and inspiring book. Anyone who is interested in or involved in foster care, especially for older children, should read this book. The reader gets to hear directly from 20 different people who have been involved in some way with foster care, many who were kids in the foster care system. Their stories are completely separate, not woven together in any way. I think this was a beautiful way to put this book together because each story is totally unique and provides its own little window into life in foster care.

-Anonymous

Such an amazing book. It tells such an important story in such a unique and compelling manner. Thank you to all the people willing to share their story, and thanks to the author for having the courage to launch this life changing book!

-Anonymous