American Spirit

by Taya Kyle

  The family has now adopted a total of seven kids, all of whom were originally placed with other families. While the sheer number of kids can put an understandable strain on the budget, the flip side is that they can pitch in to help one another through different crises and difficulties.

  As for the strain on them, Jim cites a Bible passage from James 4:17 to the effect of, If you know that there is a good you can do and you fail to do it, then you have sinned.

  “You know the verses and you teach them,” admits Jim. “But then you see it in real life and you can’t turn away.”

  As their family has grown, so has their church. Named the Brazos Christian Church—the name comes from the nearby river and the Spanish word for arms—it boasts several hundred members. A large part of its ministry aims at helping foster and adoptive parents and children. One of the favorite programs is a combination day care and “date night”—moms and dads drop off their kids for a few hours in the evening. The kids get to play and socialize—there are age-appropriate groups and games—while the parents go to a movie or go out bowling or just spend some quiet time together. It’s a very simple idea that means quite a lot to the families.

  “In the last year, we’ve been branching out and working with biological families as well,” says Jim. The idea is to help parents who are in danger of losing their children to the foster care system—a bit like preventative medicine.

  Talking with the family about raising children, the word that comes up most often is patience. The children they’ve adopted are not “easy” kids, certainly not at first. In every instance, they were rejected, and without exception the youths test to see if they’ll be rejected again—because why invest in something if it will just be taken away from you in the near future?

  One of their sons epitomized this, berating them with constant angry outbursts after he came to join them.

  I hate you.

  Why would anyone want a name like Word?

  I’m not becoming part of your family.

  Those were among the milder things he said.

  But on the day they went to court to finalize the adoption, the twelve-year-old burst into smiles, transforming miraculously into a mild-mannered and loving child—once things were legal, he figured, they couldn’t back out.

  Not that things were always smooth for him or any of the others. Just like other children, there are ups and downs—and downs and ups. But that normalcy is something of a victory in itself.

  What the Words have besides their Christian faith is a belief in themselves to be able to persevere beyond that trial period—and a faith in basic human qualities like love and kindness, which they have seen win out over suspicion and anger that the children harbor.

  Thinking the best of people under the worst circumstances—that’s a lesson for all of us, regardless of our religious beliefs or cultural background. Don’t get me wrong: it doesn’t mean being Miss Mary Sunshine and smiling through every storm that comes along. Heck, I curse at those storms as much as anyone.

  But remembering the ideal, and looking for it, can make all the difference.

  Not Abandoned

  Dream Makers

  Talking to Jim and Lori Word about adoption and the foster care system led to a question:

  What happens to children who aren’t adopted when they become young adults?

  The answer: they “age out” of the foster system and most programs when they legally become adults.

  What then?

  The Words pointed me in the direction of a group run by some of their friends: Dream Makers, a program of America’s Kids Belong.

  According to statistics compiled by the organization, some twenty-six thousand young people “age out” of the foster care system every year. While reaching your eighteenth birthday is a cause for celebration for most of us, in the case of a foster child, it can mean something very scary: no more support system.

  No family to help you make the transition to a job or college after high school. No family to do “simple things” like make sure you know how to drive, or help you select a car or an apartment, or even discuss the pros and cons of everyday situations. Imagine not having a mom’s shoulder to cry on when a relationship goes bad, or not having Dad around to advise you on some simple household repairs. No older brother or sister to give practical advice on budgeting or priorities. Grandma’s hand-me-down dishes are nonexistent.

  Dream Makers and its parent organization can’t take the place of family or friends. But it can do “small” things like help with college costs, or fund a down payment for a car, or provide that security deposit the landlord requires when renting an apartment. It has paid for “care packages” for college students, helped buy staples like bathroom towels and baby paraphernalia, and even supported special occasions like Thanksgiving Day dinners and birthday celebrations—“small” gestures that mean a lot to the recipients. A special emergency fund has paid for groceries and gas young people needed to get by when starting out on their own.

  The organization works with other groups and social workers to directly give small grants to young adults. Applications and nominations for grants can be made simply by filling out a form on the group’s website at www.dreammakersproject.org.

  A large part of the effort involves hooking up community “dream makers” with young adults in need. Social workers can make nominations or recommendations; the group will try to connect the two.

  No program or organization springs from the dust fully formed and ready to change the world; they are created, nurtured, and run by dedicated people who take an idea and a lot of goodwill, mix it with long hours and ample perspiration, and set out to make ideas reality. There’s a large team involved in Dream Makers and America’s Kids Belong; one of the driving forces is Julie Mavis, the national director.

  Foster parents themselves, Julie and her husband started the nonprofit America’s Kids Belong to help get kids adopted. The foundation’s modus operandi is to work with government agencies, religious groups, and private businesses in different communities to assist kids who need foster care or adoption to find families that can take them. While there is a high demand for infants, finding parents for older children can be very difficult; the older they get, the harder it generally becomes.

  Julie’s own experience reflects that. She and her husband were foster parents for an infant taken from his birth mother because of drug addiction. One day, the social worker called and said they had to talk. A short while later, sitting in Julie’s kitchen, the worker told her that the baby would never be going back to his birth parents.

  “Are you interested in adoption?” asked the woman.

  “What happens if we don’t adopt him?” asked Julie, who realized that there was no way in the world she would be able to adopt the little boy for good.

  “Oh, don’t worry. There’ll be a long line. I just worry about the kids who are older.”

  The social worker explained that while it’s somewhat easy to find homes for infants, the older a child gets, the harder it is to find him or her a permanent home. Hundreds of kids from grade school to high school were looking for homes in Colorado alone; each day that passed lessened the chances that they would find one.

  “My heart was just bursting with this problem,” says Julie.

  She began working on the problem, reaching out to different organizations and government connections. Soon afterward, she started America’s Kids Belong.

  “I had no clue what I was doing,” says Julie about her early days. “To be honest, I just started asking people and got help.”

  The organization went national in 2015, thanks not only to Julie and her team but to the generous financial support of Illinois businessman John Ritchie. A key component was added around the same time by Janet Kelly, former Virginia secretary of the Commonwealth and her husband, Ryan, who brought to the foundation expertise in dealing with governmental agencies and officials along with a passion for orphans.

  One of the f
oundation’s more innovative—yet seemingly simple—ideas has been to make videos of the children talking about themselves. Seeing a face and hearing a voice makes adoption far more likely.

  Dream Makers takes that idea even further, targeting young adults who have or are about to age out.

  “I’d heard a lot about kids aging out,” says Julie, who started to see the need only after America’s Kids Belong became a success. “But it wasn’t until we started seeing what happened to kids we knew that I realized how big a problem it was.”

  It really hit her hard when she heard stories of what had happened to some older children who were no longer eligible for care or programs—jail, drugs, just bad, bad things. And this wasn’t ten years after they were no longer part of a foster family or eligible for adoption; it was a few months after their birthdays.

  “I knew these kids,” she says. “I was asking, hey, what happened to Jonathon and so-and-so. And I’d get answers back like, ‘Oh, he’s in jail,’ and ‘Oh, he’s homeless.’ And I was like, you have got to be kidding!”

  Actually, it was more like: YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING!

  “This is an injustice,” she said. “This is not acceptable.”

  Young adults who age out sometimes have very serious problems, from unemployment to poverty, unplanned pregnancies to homelessness. Many don’t graduate high school, a deficiency that will haunt them the rest of their lives. A portion end up in jail or addicted to alcohol or drugs. Suicide is, unfortunately, more common in this population than among young people in general. PTSD is also common—many of the children enter the foster care system because they have experienced massive trauma at a young age, sometimes from the foster parents who were supposed to help them. Counseling is often neglected.

  Or, as Julie puts it, they don’t get into foster care because their parents didn’t provide fun snacks.

  “There are so many problems,” says Julie. “And these problems affect all of society.”

  For Julie, Dream Makers is kind of a plan B for America’s Kids Belong: if we can’t get you adopted into a family, at least we can get you some support in another way.

  “I’ve got a lot of social workers on my team,” she says. “We can talk to the kids before they age out, find out what they need, they see who we can find to help.”

  One of the things that makes Dream Makers unique is that the group doesn’t focus on basic needs, though of course it helps get those met when needed. It’s not there to take the place of government programs like Medicaid or food stamps. It isn’t running a homeless shelter. Instead, the organization concentrates primarily on the unusual things, big and small, that take lives beyond the basics.

  And dreams.

  What are your dreams? a social worker might ask. What do you want in life? What do you dream about?

  The answers can be surprising. There are the practical ones: a car to get to school, fresh clothes for a job interview. Dental care: veneers and braces, which are not covered by Medicaid, are a common request.

  Laptop computers—having a computer has practically become mandatory in today’s society. There’s no government program for that.

  The fee for caps and gowns at graduation. Not a line item in most church grant programs.

  A bike.

  And then there are the requests that, well, are so simple and so ordinary that they practically break your heart. A birthday cake. A graduation party. A baby shower.

  Most of us take those things for granted. But Julie has plenty of stories about young adults for whom something like a birthday party is an impossible dream.

  A lot of times, local people fulfill those simple but critical dreams. The helpers are ordinary people whose simple gestures mean a lot. The orthodontist down the block who remembers her own teenage self-consciousness and cures it with dental work. The baker who simply loves to create for grateful customers. It’s amazing how extraordinary “ordinary” people can be.

  “We know the kids,” says Julie. “We find out the needs and then go out into the community and find the help.”

  Projects can snowball. Someone nominates a kid for help because he needs a security deposit for an apartment. The down payment comes as a grant; a hardware store donates some paint to cheer up the place. The florist hears about it and sends over some flowers . . .

  Small things from a lot of people add up to a big thing for the person who receives them. They, in turn, often end up giving back, or at least spreading the word about the program and its benefits and possibilities.

  Spreading that word is Julie’s full-time job and passion.

  “My passion is orphans,” says Julie. “My second passion is getting other people to care about orphans.”

  To that end, Julie is a relentless speaker, encourager, and cheerleader. She’s traveled around the country sharing her enthusiasm with groups such as Rotary Clubs, kindling support for local programs as well as the organization in general.

  A lot of times she meets people who tell her flat out that they can’t foster children, let alone adopt. Yet they feel strongly that they want to help in some way.

  Dream Makers is the easy answer for them.

  “People care. And we want to help,” says Julie. “Whatever parents would ordinarily do to fill those little gaps, we can help.”

  It’s a true ripple effect—one person gets involved, and suddenly there are half a dozen helping in different ways. “Multiple people get fired up helping these kids.”

  And so does Julie.

  She was at an event when a young man—we’ll call him Xavier, though that’s not his name—spoke about how Dream Makers had helped him. Julie, scheduled to go on after him, was overwhelmed with emotion as she heard his story.

  “He ripped my heart out,” she confesses. “It was hard for me to give my speech.”

  But what she heard afterward hit her even harder: Xavier was, in fact, homeless; her organization was paying for him to stay in a motel as he looked for work.

  “How long can we do this?” asked one of the program administrators.

  On her way home, Julie told her husband, Brian, that the young man needed a permanent place to stay.

  “What do you think if he came with us to stay for a while?” she asked.

  “I guess that would be OK,” he said after a moment or two.

  “Good. Because he’s coming tomorrow.”

  Since then, he’s gone on to start a business as a personal chef. I have no doubt he’ll have his own restaurant someday.

  “It’s really cool watching both sides of it,” says Julie.

  And that little boy who inspired her in the first place?

  He now lives in the next town over from Julie and has some very loving parents.

  It’s great when everything comes together.

  Two

  Getting Them There

  Movers and Shakers

  One thing Chris always said about veterans in need was that they don’t want a handout; they want a hand up.

  That’s true of many people, I think; certainly most of those I’ve been privileged to meet. That hand up comes in many different forms. One of the most basic is transportation—both literally and figuratively.

  In the case of many of the young people and their families, simple transportation, whether for treatment or to see a loved one, is a huge barrier. Our beautiful country is above everything else a beautiful large country. Getting to a place where people can treat your disease or where you can see a loved one is a physical and often mental challenge.

  The amazing thing for me is that time and again, the people who provide that transportation as volunteers often say that they get as much out of doing so as the people they transport. When I first heard that, I thought it must be an exaggeration. But if so, why did people who had so much else going on in their lives keep doing it? Why would people who were successful businessmen and -women, and even celebrities, keep coming back for more?

  Maybe it was more than something people like t
o say. Maybe unselfishly helping others in a very immediate and tangible way does benefit the giver as well as the person in need.

  Getting people to places they need to be is certainly a challenge. But transportation is not always a means to an end. It can be an important part of the journey, as some of these stories suggest.

  In medieval times, pilgrims traveled on foot through Europe, stopping at cathedrals, churches, and shrines to connect with the artifacts of their religion. Many of those tales speak as highly of the journey itself as the fancy buildings they visited.

  That same impulse, I think, powers us today and is very much a part of the American Spirit.

  Soaring for Others

  Angel Flight West

  It occurred to me, after hearing those wonderful stories of perseverance and heroism by children and their parents, that something was missing. In almost every case, I could see where the inspiration was coming from and how the next generation was able to tap into the wellspring of the American soul. I realized the doctors and nurses, the caregivers and counselors, the researchers and scientists, were all doing extraordinary work to find cures and apply them, shepherding kids and their parents through difficult therapies and into recovery.

  But how did they get there?

  Not figuratively—how did they get to the one research hospital in America where a new cancer drug was being tested? How did they get from, say, Alaska to Texas to undergo a special surgery only one team in the country can perform?

  Some people were lucky; experimental treatment was in their hometown or nearby. Others drove all night.

  But what about the people for whom it was too far to drive? What about the single mom who couldn’t afford air- or train fare?

  How do you get where you absolutely need to be when money is scarce and your resources are thin?

  Angels.

  Not literal angels—though I’d guess they might be along for the ride. The angels I’m talking about are the pilots of operations like Angel Flight West, a volunteer organization that transports medical patients and their families at no charge to them.