Foster Care Alumni of America (FCAA) is a national nonprofit made up mostly of alumni of care. Its mission is to connect the alumni community to transform policy and practice, ensuring opportunity for people in and from foster care. Steve Rideout, immediate past president of FCAA had an idea about telling the many stories of foster care and raised it last year with the FCAA board.
As a result FCAA has been given the opportunity to provide recorded stories from Foster Care over the radio and internet through WHCP Community Radio 101.5 FM in Cambridge, MD. The station was started in 2015 by Mike Starling, who recently retired as the Chief Technology Officer for National Public Radio (NPR). Steve, who is on the board of the radio station , suggested the idea to Mike, who urged him to develop it into a viable program.
Over the past several months, Steve, Mike, and board members of FCAA have been working on a concept for the program that will be broadcast on the low power FM station in Cambridge and streamed over the internet at www.whcp.org. While there are alumni voices of foster care on blogs and elsewhere, other voices of foster care are not as prevalent. Those voices come from the many people who play important roles in the work of foster care and the lives of children in care and alumni of care.
The idea came to Steve as a result of his membership on the FCAA board, his work as a lawyer for children and later as a Juvenile Court Judge in Virginia, and his foster care consulting work during the past 11 years. As he listened to the alumni board members and others talk about foster care, he thought about how the many stories of foster care needed to be told.
FCAA is reaching out to those who have stories to tell or a song to sing about their foster care experience. That includes everyone involved – alumni of care; foster, adoptive, and biological parents; siblings and relatives of children who have been in care; social/case workers; people involved in policy; legislators; lawyers for parties in a case; CASA staff and volunteers; judges; teachers; and anyone who has mentored a foster child.
Anyone who wants to share his or her story can record it on their Smartphone and send it to fosterstories@whcp.org. They can also contact Steve Rideout there if they have questions.
Help with telling your story can be found on the website of Cambridge Community Radio at http://www.whcp.org/foster-stories/. For alumni of care, there is information about strategic sharing. There are also some helpful hints about how to prepare to tell and record your story.
With regard to the stories, songs, or poems,
• They must be true and based on a real experience.
• They should not slander or libel anyone.
• Any story tellers who want to remain anonymous can do so. They can just give their first name, a nick name, or their initials. They do not need to say in what state or town the story took place or where they are now.
• If someone does not want to record his/her story, just write it down and send it to fosterstories@whcp.org, and someone will be found to read/tell the story.
• Try to tell the story within 4 minutes. If the story is longer than 4 minutes, record it in segments of less than 4 minutes each.
• The stories should be as focused as possible on a topic or theme that is important to the story teller.
• The stories can be about anything in a foster care experience. A personal foster care story or that of someone they know. Something that happened in a case in which they were involved. They choose the story and give it a name.
• FCAA hopes that the stories will be inspirational to others, provide an idea that worked or information that might help another child in care. They can be about a decision that a judge made or an experience that the story teller had as a result of their involvement in representing a child as his/her lawyer, Guardian ad Litem, social worker, or CASA volunteer. The stories can be about being a foster parent and how they were able to impact a child’s life or the child impacted them.
FCAA is not paying anyone to share their story and will not sell the stories to anyone. They will obtain written approval to share the stories through WHCP – LP FM and to allow them or portions of them to be shared for free with any other radio station, blog, or on the internet.
The hope is that these stories will provide to individuals and communities a picture of foster care here in America and will cause more people to become engaged in helping to improve outcomes for children at risk of foster care, in care, or suffering the effects of having been in care.
For those with a story to share or who know someone who does, information is available on the websites of WHCP.org and fostercarealumni.org about how best to do that. Any inquiries about this project can be made at fosterstories@whcp.org.
Owner/Editor - Chris Chmielewski