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    Safeguarding
     the promise
     of forgotten
           youth

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.  

Copyright Jeremiah's Promise, 2004
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