53 Per Day

It was a tough Labor Day weekend if you found yourself on the bubble of making a NFL team with aspirations of stardom. Each year NFL teams are forced to make some tough decisions in an attempt to trim their rosters to 53 players and another 10 for the practice squad.

In the NFL, 53 are chosen to stay. In foster care, 53 are told to go home, EVERYDAY.

Stop for a second at put that image in your mind. A football team. Your favorite football team. You know all their names, their colleges, hell, in some cases you even know their wives’ names (lookin at you Gisele!). That group in your head? Can you see them all standing shoulder to shoulder in rows on bleachers? See them smiling? See their futures set in from of them? See how many of them they are? Think about that number 53. Over 4 dozen. Think about the enormity of the team photo in your mind.

Mind-blowing. That many kids age out of foster care PER DAY. Today. 53 kids today.

The Atlanta Falcons were just kicked out on the street to make their own way with no resources.

The New England Patriots have to leave the team facility every Holiday.

The Cincinnati Bengals had their identity stolen just before the season started.

These would be silly headlines if they weren’t true; not in the literal sense, clearly I’m being facetious to make a point: a football team per day is being sent out in the world on their own.

If you’ve ever watched a game on TV, you’ve seen how crowded a sideline can get. Every day that crowd of people are left to their own devices. Is the enormity of this problem coming through? Am I presenting this in a coherent way? Let’s try this approach.

There are 32 NFL teams. That means over the course of a year ELEVEN NFLs age out of care. ELEVEN?!?! To steal a line from the ESPN NFL Live crew, “C’mon Man!!!”.

20,000 kids age out of foster care per year. Eleven professional leagues a year. We even keep stats!

For instance, one stat is that less than 10% of kids who age out of care get a college degree.

How about this one? They say somewhere around half of all the homeless people you see wondering around once spent time in care.

Or the one about the one that says that girls who age out of care are 50% more at risk of getting pregnant?

We’re 5 times more likely to suffer from PTSD than the general public.

Boys are 4 times as likely to commit a crime, girls 10 times.

Seven times the risk of drug dependency and twice as likely to take up drinking.

And so on and so forth.

I’m on this team. I played back at the turn of the century. Back then there were little to no resources to speak of in regards to aging out. You were done and you were on your own. You figured it out for yourself. Or you didn’t and you became a stat.

I got lucky. I could have been a stat. For whatever reason, I got away clean. But out of that 20,000 a year, a good chunk of them will struggle, or worse. Those are the facts. Those are the numbers, stats and problems I want to embed in your brain. This is an epidemic. If you saw 20,000 lost people walking down the highway, you’d offer to help, wouldn’t you?

There are droves of people who are trying to get this message through to you. I’m one of many. What gets lost in all of the messages and different people trying to convey those messages to you is they don’t capture the enormity of it all.

My hope is this football analogy is the answer. You can visually see what 53 people a day looks like.

It just boggles the mind that 53 kids a day can be ushered out into the world without anyone looking out for them. But that’s what we’ve got. The next step is to find viable solutions that actually work. Then comes my part in all this. It’s a job I need to do a lot better.

My job is to dispense this information. I do okay but I can do a lot more. It’s the reason I started this magazine in the first place. I couldn’t find any information when I aged out, again there wasn’t a lot information for me at the advent of the internet, the idea for the magazine stemmed from the need for that information. So the fact that I’m having trouble presenting the vast amount of resources out there is bothering me.

I’ve got the links page on the website but that isn’t nearly enough. I plan on spending the winter vetting the different nonprofits and agencies who cater to aging out youth. I’ll figure out who is legit and who is just going through the motions. I’ll compile a strong list and I’ll put it all in one place. It’s what I set out to do all those years ago.

I’m not saying I have any of the answers that would end or even put a dent in this epidemic. I don’t figure I’m smart enough to take on such lofty endeavors. What I do have are ideas and first-hand experience. I also have this great platform to work from and lots of eyes watching me so the message gets out to as many folks as I can muster.

So that’s my agenda for the winter.

Let’s chat it up about this edition of the magazine before I let you loose on it.

It’s a great one for many reasons but the main reason this issue is so good is because of the people. I’ve known young Frank Anderson from California for a few years now thanks to the power of the internet. He told me way back when about his idea for an awareness campaign. All these years later and Project Blue is a reality. It’s a real kick to see these young advocates find their place in the world of foster care. Frank is a great one too. He’s a got a fire in his belly to create change. And he’s doing it on a shoe string budget, which I respect deeply. He’s one to keep an eye on.

Then there is the ever jovial Charles Prinzen, a heck of a nice guy who I met via Foster Focus Contributor extraordinaire, Dr. John DeGarmo. Mr. Prinzen has such a thirst to share his story that I couldn’t possibly keep him out of the magazine. His life story is pretty interesting, I thought it wise to share it with the rest of you.

Lastly, Dr. Michael Corrigan is new to the Foster Focus family and he’s got all kinds of ideas to improve the system. We get along because he describes himself as a smart alec kid who somehow became a psychologist. I totally get the transition from knucklehead to notable.

There are also some timely school related tips at the end of the issue that you should take them time to look over.

Okay, well there’s next month issue for me to get after. I hope you enjoy the issue.

I’ll see you next month.