Each year in the
United States, up to 25,000 teens aged 18 and 19 will be pushed out of the foster
care system. Each year, about 200 young people from California's Santa Clara and
San Mateo counties turn 18 and emancipate into a life of poverty, homelessness
and hopelessness. Most of these youth are disastrously unprepared for life ahead
of them.
Another 500 youth, originally from our area but placed in homes outside of Silicon
Valley, are due to return to the place they knew as home. But there is no home
for them.
Fifty percent of foster youth in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties are homeless
upon turning 18 and being thrust from the system. That figure is double the national
average of 25 percent.
About
40 percent of them will fail to graduate high school. The
same number will end up on welfare. Before the end of their
second year of independence, one-third will have had children
on their own without adequate financial or social resources.
Nearly 20 percent will end up in prison.
Many foster
teens enter the system as young children. They were placed
there with the hope of reuniting quickly with their families
once the parents were rehabilitated. When rehab failed their
hope was in being adopted by families who would give them
the love, stability and a sense of belonging their own parent
or parents could not provide.
That
is not the reality.
A child
is placed in foster care when parents die or cannot care for
their kids. Usually neglect, emotional, physical or sexual
abuse is the reason children are wrenched from their homes
and placed in a system that tries hard to do right by them
but in the end often victimizes them again. These kids are
bounced from home to home throughout their lives. It is not
uncommon for foster families to add their own emotional, physical
or sexual abuses to these kids' histories. Many children are
separated from their brothers and sisters and placed in separate
homes. Kids can be placed with as many as 20 families by the
time the court says they are old enough to make it on their
own.
But they
can't make it on their own. They don't have the tools to do
it.
That's
why Jeremiah's Promise was founded.
