Run Chris Run

Editor’s Note: If you have read this magazine for any length of time, you know how much I hate reading or writing about myself. For the start of year five, I have yielded to the massive amount of people who have asked that the story be told. I’m a sucker for peer pressure. If the story must be told, it should be told by a quality writer. Echo Garrett has over thirty years of journalism experience and a place in the foster care system as co-founder of the Orange Duffel Bag Initiative. I could think of no one better to tell the story of how we got here. Enjoy.

Everybody has a story – especially when it comes to foster care alumni and those in care -- and Chris Chmielewski is determined to make sure those voices are heard loud and clear.

When Chmielewski -- who found himself in foster care at age 14, was desperately looking for resources as he came closer and closer to aging out at age 18, he was frustrated by the lack of information for young people in care and alumni of the system. “I vowed that someday I would publish a magazine for foster care alumni and those in this space,” says Chmielewski, 36, who made good on that promise by launching Foster Focus Magazine in May 2011.

The publisher runs the magazine out of his house in small, quiet Watsontown, Pennsylvania, with the help of his wife Trisha and support of his children Noah, 11, Layla, 10, and Eva, 8.

Chmielewski, who is also the editor-in-chief and sole owner, has grown the publication from an idea to having subscribers in all 50 states and countries all across the world celebrates the end of the magazine’s fourth year, fittingly during National Foster Care Month.

Although Chmielewski is devoted to making foster care real and understandable for people in order to create positive change in a broken system, the one story he’s loathed to tell is his own.

“I prefer to tell everyone else’s stories. There are so many alumni, foster parents, social workers, CASAs and current foster kids in this country that I feel that’s where the focus should be. They are thriving or suffering, succeeding or trying to find their way, it’s important that their relatable stories be told, if for no other reason than to let others know they aren’t alone. My story isn’t the only one out there.”

That said, to understand the remarkable progress that this young magazine has made in just five years and its publisher’s drive, you need to know the man behind the vision.

Chris was and remains a happy go lucky personality. “Things generally don’t bring me down. I have a cool knack for bouncing back in a hurry. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism, but it works. A short memory has become key for what I do.”

He would spend part of his childhood like every other kid in a state of happy child’s play. “My brother and I went everywhere in town and we were signed up to every extracurricular activity there was. We were in scouts, baseball, football, basketball, heck I was an altar boy for a few years that I can remember.”

Next came what Chmielewski refers to as “the Ritalin years”. These are the years that he just can’t seem to remember wholly.

“I just kind of floated through ages 8-13 and the next thing I knew I was in foster care’’ says Chmielewski, “I don’t remember being unhappy, I just remember that era as very cloudy.”

“From what I have been told, I was kind of a handful. School was rough for the teachers and I kept finding myself in trouble.” He struggles to recall this time of his life, “I guess I was just this ball of energy that no one could control. I was grounded constantly. The one thing I remember clearly is being in my room for hours on end surrounded by newspapers and books.”

That time spent alone helped to hone Chmielewski’s other interests which were reading and writing: “Starting at age seven I’d read the newspaper. I read the police blotter and followed the stock market. I read everything. ”

“I would even take it a step further. I would take the case in the police blotter to trial and come up with a verdict based on the evidence in the article. I’d pick stocks and follow them as if I owned them and I would pretend to buy and sell actual real estate in the classified ads. I had a lot of hours logged in my room being grounded. The love of print helped get me through it.”

That would love of print would never go away. “I love everything about it. The smell, the gloss, the ink and the time that goes into making the finished product.”

This is the part of the story that Chmielewski has told on numerous occasions.

“I don’t talk about life before care because there are more than enough alumni with much rougher upbringings than I had, their stories are far more important to gain knowledge from than anything I could offer. So I tend to pick up the story here.”

After bouncing through a series of foster homes when he entered care, Chmielewski settled in with Maxine and Richard Black, long-time foster parents in the town of Milton before moving as a family up the road to the small quiet borough named Watsontown.

“I initially thought, ‘Excellent. They are old, and I can get away with anything here,” says Chmielewski. The teen soon found out that the Blacks were strict but fair, and he eventually grew to love the couple.

He credits the Blacks for reinforcing his work ethic. “On the first night Dad sat me down to explain the rules and give me the lay of the land.” Chmielewski remembers, “He made it a point of saying ‘Because of where you are, because of the hand you were dealt and the position you find yourself in, you have to work three times harder than everyone else in the room. If you work as hard as everyone else, it may go unnoticed. If you work twice as hard, you’re just keeping up in the eyes of the world. If you work three times harder than everyone else, then they’ll have to take notice.’ And that stuck with me.”

Chmielewski, had always been a hard worker, he started working in a greenhouse and a baseball field concession stand when he turned 12 had always dreamed of working for himself. While in care he had always found a job to circumvent the seven dollar a week allowance given through his foster care agency. “I’d do whatever odd job needed taken care of.”

“Once when I was playing basketball at the YMCA, the sauna caught fire. While all my friends stood around outside, I ran to the local newspaper’s office and asked for a pen and pad. I had the front page the next morning and fifteen bucks for writing it!”

During his junior and senior years, he cleaned a heavy equipment garage – often working shifts from 4:30 pm to 3:30 am – where his duties included cleaning filthy bathrooms. “Truck drivers are not the cleanest folks in the world” Chmielewski says with a laugh.

Chmielewski signed a waiver to stay in care at age 18. During his senior year, Chmielewski turned 19 and started to feel guilty. “When I signed that waiver to stay with my foster parents, they no longer got any money for taking care of me,” he says. “I was eating everything in sight and using a lot of water. I saw them wake up every day at 4:30 am. My foster mom ironed by foster dad’s jeans and made him breakfast before he went off to work. I was the only foster kid left in their house, and I felt like I was a burden. They never said that, but I felt like they were done with foster parenting. They were ready to relax and be with each other.”

Besides, Chmielewski had met a 30-year-old woman, who invited him to come live with her rent-free. So on a rainy afternoon with just three weeks left until high school graduation, he stuffed all his belongings in a black trash bag and headed out the door.

“You don’t have to leave, Chris,” his foster dad said. “At least wait until you graduate from high school.”

“I eat too much of your food,” the teen replied and kept walking.

Chmielewski wryly attributes this move to the adolescent thought process.

A few days later, the vice principal called Chmielewski’s name over the intercom.

“I hear that you are living somewhere else besides with the Blacks,” he said.

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Do you have any bills in your name there?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, then I have no proof that you are still living in my district, so you are expelled from this school as of today.”

The vice principal walked Chmielewski to his locker and watched to make sure that the teen removed all his belongings.

He trudged back to his house. “I got a job in Michigan, and I’m moving tomorrow,” announced his new roommate.

She left the next day, but assured Chmielewski that the rent was paid through the summer, so he could continue to stay there. He had invited his classmates to his new place for a prom party. “They took one look at my wicker outdoor furniture in the living room and left,” says Chmielewski.

Within a month, the landlord had caught wind that his tenant had left the state and evicted Chmielewski, who subsequently couch-surfed and sometimes slept in a public park when the weather was nice. “During the summer, nobody knows you’re homeless,” he says. “They just assume you’re hiking.”

His best friend’s mom found out how the teen was living and invited him to live with their family. She made sure Chmielewski completed his GED and got him signed up for classes at a community college.

“I was more interested in working for the newspaper and playing basketball for the school than in attending the communication major and photography classes I’d signed up for,” he says. “I think I attended three classes the whole semester.”

That was 1999 – the year Chmielewski found that information about resources for former foster youth and teens who were aging out of the system were virtually nonexistent. If I ever get my stuff together I am going to make it so you can get answers to your questions, the frustrated teen vowed to himself.

He left school with $12,000 in student loans and a romance with a girl named Trisha, who he married at age 23. After working for a bunch of newspapers, he got hired by an entrepreneur who owned the local penny saver publication. “I didn’t know how to do the job, but watched the guy I was replacing for two weeks,” recalls Chmielewski, a quick study who learned to do computer and layout work from that crash session.

Not satisfied with the original format, Chmielewski turned it into a real newspaper, adding a sports section and local news. The owner sold it, and shortly thereafter, the young newspaperman was fired for “correcting too many errors during the final edit pre-press. I was disillusioned,” admits Chmielewski.

In 2003, right after the newspaper sold, the determined entrepreneur rented an office and decided that the time was right to launch Foster Focus Magazine. A web ad with a one-page subscription form yielded 40 subscribers. “I spent all my days calling people, trying to hustle ads and subscriptions from my office at Hard Times Enterprises,” he says. But a month into it, reality set in; the money that the subscriptions generated would barely cover the rent on his office space, and there was no money left to cover producing, printing and mailing the magazine.

He penned a letter offering to reimburse each subscriber the $40 subscription price or to give each a subscription for life once he got the magazine off the ground. “No one asked for money back, and I was determined not to let those people down,” he says.

After closing his magazine, Chmielewski did a brief stint as a stay-at-home dad since he and Trisha had just had their second child. Then he took a series of temp jobs, one of which was as a greeter for a car dealership. Within six weeks, he was offered a chance to go on the road, selling cars up and down the East Coast. His wife agreed that it was a good opportunity, and with a third child on the way, the young couple needed the money.

“I was smiley and happy-go-lucky and by the six-month mark, I was turned into salesman for the company,” says Chmielewski, who stayed on the road until Baby #3 proved to be more than she could handle, and his wife asked him to quit. Chmielewski quickly landed a job close to home, working for another car dealer.

After almost eight long years, once again Chmielewski decided to give his dream of a magazine another go. He’d spent those years laying the groundwork. He’d become friends with a local printer and had networked with hundreds in the field.

This time, he had the money, the people and the means to make it work. And he’d learned a lesson: “No office, no overhead, and no board of directors, just me working from home. Besides, I’d told so many people about it, there was no way out.”

He started a website on the cheap and launched a Facebook page for the start up magazine. He kept his day job at the car dealer for the first two years even though, he admits, “I wanted to quit about 6,000 times.”

Although supporters often offered funding, Chmielewski refused to take any money other than for subscriptions or ads. “I’ll never forget my foster dad sitting me down at the dinner table one time, and saying, ‘Because of the hand you’ve been dealt, you need to work three times harder than everybody else.’ And he was right,” says Chmielewski.

“To make something like this happen, you have to work hard. I’ve busted my ass. Every subscription is earned, and I made good on my promise to all 40 of those original subscribers.”

Other than his own family, the people who are constantly on his mind are the 1.5 million former foster kids he represents and the 20,000+ who age out each year. “I don’t do anything without thought,” says Chmielewski, who likes to joke around. “I am a goof, but when it comes to this job, I have a Larry Bird mentality. I’m going to keep shooting, and every month I am trying to outdo myself and make sure I don’t do anything to make my fellow foster alumni look foolish.”

One of his biggest challenges is maintaining an objective eye and delivering fair and balanced reporting when his email and Facebook messages are overflowing with “stories that crush me.”

For instance, he recently received a story about re-homing – the practice of placing a foster youth that you’ve adopted with another person – without going through the proper channels.

“Although it pisses me off, if the writer hadn’t pulled the piece, I would have run stories that showed both sides of the issue,” says Chmielewski, who tries to avoid political or religious issues and refuses to endorse political candidates, even if they are foster alumni.

“As an opinionated person, I have lots to say about predatory practices when it comes to foster care, but that’s not what the magazine is supposed to be. What I think on any given topic isn’t important.”

One issue that especially bothers him is the turnover among foster parents, case workers and others who serve kids in foster care. “Foster care shouldn’t have the same turnover as McDonald’s,” he says, but his efforts to start a hotline to answer questions and help stem the tide have been unsuccessful to day. “Putting a team together has been tricky.”

But in typical fashion, Chmielewski has decided to forge ahead on his own and plans to operate the hotline personally until he can find more people willing to help.

Stories that have struck a chord tend to be focused on celebrities who were in care. Chmielewski profiled Jimmy Graham, who played for the Saints and now for the Seahawks, and was adopted by his social worker. Another story that got a lot of attention was written by a retired judge on the inter-county placement of children and the rules about how a child gets moved from town to town. “That helped thousands of readers,” says Chmielewski.

Recent issues have dealt with topics ranging from suicide prevention to problems with food -- like eating disorders -- that often result from dealing with rules that vary among group and foster homes.

A lot of his best story ideas come from alumni. “I’ve never said ‘no’ to an alumni,” he says, noting that he’s often frustrated when he goes to meetings about how to improve foster care only to discover that not a single decision maker or person on a panel is from care: “You wouldn’t see a military event where not one single person is from the military. It still baffles me that you discuss foster care and don’t have anybody from the system in the conversation.”

Chmielewski has now recruited eight regular columnists, including Rita Soronen, CEO of Dave Thomas Foundation and Rhonda Sciortino and Dr. Sandi Morgan, a professor at Vanguard University in California and an expert on human trafficking. As well as an alumni column penned by Shalita O’Neale and a new foster parent column by Chris Zollner.

“I’m trying to change the narrative of how foster care and our alumni are portrayed in the media,” says the editor/publisher, who purposely puts an emphasis on positives stories with the hope that “people won’t be afraid of us anymore. Traumas should be an indicator of where you were at that time. Don’t dwell on the traumas. Tell your story, but don’t become what some call a ‘professional foster kid.’”

The most heavily trafficked pages on the magazine’s website are famous foster kids and a feature called “What does foster care feel like?”

An optimist, Chmielewski dreams of a day when group homes no longer exist and all the decisions about foster care are no longer made by “a bunch of old white guys,” and a foster alum “doesn’t have to run an ad on Craig’s List asking for a birthday party. We rallied our alumni and flooded her with birthday messages. The bigger the magazine gets, the less likely our alumni will feel all alone.”

Chmielewski still does everything himself with no staff: “I run this thing on Facebook and with my big mouth. I did it this way to show other kids that you don’t have to have a pile of money to make your dream happen.”

Chmielewski is determined to continue to live his own life his way: “I can’t fail. I’ve got an entire community behind me. I’m scared to death every day. I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing, that no one is going to buy the magazine, or that I’ll cover the wrong story. I’ll sell an ad and be scared about whether the check is coming. I have to do better than anyone has ever done or the next kid might not get a chance. I work like their future is my future. I feel like every step I take with the magazine, they are right next to me in the office, and I can’t let them down.”

His message: Just get up and do it. Do not wait for other people to make your dreams come true.