“Though nobody can go back and make a new beginning…anyone can start over and make a new ending” ~Chico Xavier
I found a teenage girl microwaving donated mac n’ cheese on my most-recent visit to deliver your donations. Because of all of you, she immediately recognized me as the J3T lady and started to cry. She made me promise to share that because of you “we have food to eat. We don’t have to worry about being hungry. We can now go into the classroom and do our school work. We are thankful to all of you. It makes us feel good to know that strangers care about us.” After leaving foster care, the youth at RWJD are determined to start over and improve their lives. Because of your support, these youth are even more determined; you are changing lives.
Please read the Arizona Republic’s Season for Sharing article below about RWJD to learn more about the lives of these youths. You are eliminating food insecurity and helping them succeed.
This month request:
• Canned fruit
• Canned ravioli
A Happy and Healthy New Year.
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AZCENTRAL – The Arizona Republic | Season for Sharing | azcentral.com
Jewish Family & Children’s Services teaches foster kids independence
Lauren Loftus, Special to The Republic8:34 p.m. MST December 22, 2015
When we leave the nest, those of us who grew up with parents in a stable environment often take the simple things for granted. In a fender bender, they’re the first people we call. They’re at the bank with us when we open our first account. They show us how to separate our whites and colors in the laundry.
But what about the more than 17,500 kids in Arizona’s foster-care system who don’t have that support system? Who do they call to help with the simple things?
“We could call our parents if we ran into tough spot, whereas these kiddos don’t have that luxury,” says Gina Harper, director of the job-development program at Jewish Family & Children’s Services (JFCS), a non-profit behavioral health agency in Phoenix. The program benefits teenagers who are aging out of the foster-care system.
Foster children who turn 18 are essentially on their own. They have to secure housing, apply for college or find a job, make car payments, compile a budget. That’s a whole lot of responsibility for any teenager, let alone one without a parental lifeline.
Through grants like The Republic’s Season for Sharing, the JFCS provided more than 1,000 hours of case management to current and former foster-care youth in support of their education, life skills and employment goals.
“In some ways, we’re like pseudo parents,” Harper says. “We help them with basic needs.” That could be anything from a basic meal at the JFCS center in north Phoenix, a bus pass to get to and from a job or help with an electric bill. They also help with the bigger things by providing career and education assessments. If clients haven’t graduated from high school, the JFCS helps them study for the GED. Or if they’re focused on starting a career, the JFCS helps them build job experience.
In addition to job-readiness classes — think clerical-skill building, resume help and mock interviews — the JFCS also partners with Valley businesses to offer clients internship opportunities. Places like veterinary clinics, hospitals and mechanics shops offer paid internships so clients can be exposed to career tracks.
For 19-year-old Andrew Santos, that’s IT. Santos came to the JFCS a year and a half ago after he’d been evicted from his apartment and was without a job. In the foster-care system since he was 13, he had been in and out of 10 high schools and had yet to graduate.
“When I turned 18, I did become lost in the world,” Santos says. Like most kids his age, he didn’t know a lot about how the world worked. But, he says, “You know how you have parents that teach you how to do this how to do that? I didn’t.”
Through JFCS, he enrolled in online high school and found an internship working with computers. He graduated in October and started taking classes at Rio Salado Community College. Now married with a baby due Christmas Eve, he says he’d love to build apps and software and even own his own business one day.
JFCS, he says, was there for him at his lowest. And like any good parent or guardian, it showed him the ropes to independence and self-sufficiency.
“They teach you how to be dependent on yourself,” he says. “They teach you how to be on your own.”