South Valley foster children receive pragmatic support for the
jump into adulthood
Ryan Gosling, 20, has a unique reason for wanting to be a police
officer.
It was a police officer who saved his family from a horrible
life when he was 10, he said, while his mother was unemployed,
homeless and abusing drugs. If it wasn’t for the police officer who
stopped her and searched at just the right time, Gosling said, he
and his sister, 6, and his brother, 3, would not have been taken to
a children’s shelter and eventually to the home of their adoptive
parents where they have thrived for the past 10 years.
South Valley foster children receive pragmatic support for the jump into adulthood
Ryan Gosling, 20, has a unique reason for wanting to be a police officer.
It was a police officer who saved his family from a horrible life when he was 10, he said, while his mother was unemployed, homeless and abusing drugs. If it wasn’t for the police officer who stopped her and searched at just the right time, Gosling said, he and his sister, 6, and his brother, 3, would not have been taken to a children’s shelter and eventually to the home of their adoptive parents where they have thrived for the past 10 years.
Now Gosling is studying administration of justice at Gavilan College in Gilroy and his sister, 16 and his brother, 13, go to school in Morgan Hill and get good grades. His sister dances and his brother plays baseball. It’s a far cry from their old life where Gosling got into fights with other kids and he and his sister didn’t always go to school.
Gosling is one of 28,000 California youth who are “aging out” of the foster care system to face life on their own with help from the state’s independent living skills program for 16 to 21 year olds. The youth in the program are taught life skills about things that aren’t normally covered in school, such as how to get and keep a job, pay bills, balance a checkbook, do laundry, get into college, take public transportation and get along with roommates. Things that even more privileged youth struggle with.
But most importantly, the group sessions Gosling attends administered by Community Solutions in Morgan Hill are a place of support for youth guilty of no crime except being born to parents who could not be depended upon.
“There have been days where I’ve had a bad day at work or school and I go there and I can just forget everything,” Gosling said. “There’s people I can talk with and have fun with, and it’s like everything goes away.”
The youth learn something new every week, Gosling said. Speakers come to teach them about things, they get tutoring for their classes. If you have a question about anything at all under the sun, Gosling said they will find answer for you or find someone who can. Program manager Marianne Marafino calls the approach “holistic” and “empowering.” Every part of the youth’s lives is touched upon from having healthy relationships to nutrition.
Without the program, Gosling said he may not have gotten far in college, either giving up or not attempting it at all. He’s also kept his job at Nob Hill Foods for two years and three months. The customers can be rude sometimes, but Gosling said he views it as practice for when he has to deal with unhappy people as a police officer.
“It’s such a rewarding feeling to see these kids in the community thriving,” Marafino said. “They are so resilient, they are such survivors.”
Community Solutions administers the program in six sites from Gilroy to South San Jose to 70 youths.
Advocates of the independent living skills program say that foster-care youth are more likely than Vietnam veterans to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. They are more likely to become parents at a young age or become homeless.
Even with the program, 2.3 percent of the youth receiving ILP report that they are not in safe or affordable housing. It’s an improvement over the 1990s when 25 percent of youth raised in foster care reported being homeless. Ten percent of foster care youth “aging out” still do not receive the program for various reasons.
“We have a lot of people who move constantly,” Marafino said. “We really do have a lot of kids who will call us out of the blue.”
Children in foster care often find that they have gone from an unstable family into an unstable system where social workers are burned out and the turnover rate is high.
“If I’m not enjoying my job these youth know,” Marafino said. “These youth are so smart.”
Some kids jump from home to home, not getting along with families. Gosling has been fortunate.
“I never ran away,” Gosling said. “Never gotten into a fight in school and never been suspended.”
If kids get along with the people they are staying with, they will learn their boundaries, learn what buttons not to push, Gosling said. Some don’t and break rules, like curfew. Sometimes it’s enough for parents to tell authorities, “I don’t want them, take them back,” Gosling said.
Gosling has found himself talking to other kids in the program about how he’s dealt with some of the financial issues he’s had. Marafino said she would like to see more kids become mentors to others in the group.
The couple who adopted Gosling and his siblings were originally looking for one child, but when they saw pictures of the three kids it was decided that all of them would come stay in their home. After the first night the kids were told that if they wanted to live there they could. As the older brother at 10, Gosling decided it was where they would live. There was only one bedroom in the beginning, but the couple’s daughter was leaving for college and soon there was another free room for them.
Gosling and his mother have gone their separate ways, he said. He was in contact with her, and even met his dad for the first time recently, but he hasn’t talked to either of them for a while.
Gosling doesn’t hide from others that he was adopted. People are often shocked.
“They look at me like, ‘oh, I’m sorry,'” Gosling said. “And I say, ‘I don’t need your sympathy, I’m happy where I’m at. Some of them ask me ‘what did you do?’ or they’ll feel sorry for me. I just want people to know that someone else made that decision. In a way I’m grateful for what my mom had done. I had a better life. Something even worse would have happened.”
Gosling said that’s the message that he gets from the counselors in the program, which Gosling will have to leave in less than a year. There are efforts being made to extend the age of eligibility to 24 years old, but Gosling said he is ready to move on without the program.
“It’s an awesome group,” Gosling said. “I’ve had a lot of fun.”
There might be a sense of emptiness in his heart for an hour and half every week, but that’s life, Gosling said, and it’s always time to move on.
