Prospective foster and adoptive parents are welcome at any Open House listed on our website. Please call one of the regional coordinators listed at the bottom of this newsletter or

for more information or to schedule an individual appointment.

  Click here for the most current listing of open houses across the state.

• Parents - important info on the newest youth craze.... In addition to what is mentioned in this article doctors are warning that placing lip balm on your eyelids that has been in contact with Herpes Simplex (cold sores) can lead to serious consequences.  

  What will they think of next?
  The Cool New Way to Get High... 
   
• A former foster youth makes it to the Time Magazine 100 Most Influential People.
  Her sphere of influence - tough stuff - but bless this young lady's courage and leadership! Wilthelmina "T" Ortiz Walker Pettigrew 
• It's time for Tuesday Trainings for foster, adoptive and relative caregivers. Today's topic:
  Parenting the Sexually Abused Child. 
  Once a week we post a training that many agencies will approve for post-licensing credit. Check our "Notes" section for more information and to download a copy of the Resource Parent Training Credit Form. Once you have completed the training you will need to fill this form out in order to receive credit.  
• From our friends at True Colors: Wanted: Foster home for a transgender girl, 15. She is in school in Hartford, but can be transported to school from any fairly reasonable distance. Do you have room in your heart and home for a teen who desperately needs you? Do you know someone who does? Please spread the word to your friends, your community of faith, your work colleagues. Lets not set her up to be the next trans child in an adult prison.... Contact Robin McHaelen at (860) 232-0050 if you can help. Visit website  

Ms. Capri Cruz is a New York foster care alumnus turned author and motivational speaker. She is also a mental health therapist working with foster children. She is on a national mission to help heal, educate, and empower foster youth to become successful and effective people who ROCK! This excerpt was printed with her permission.        

 "As human beings, we all want to be happy and free from misery . . .we have learned that the key to happiness is inner peace. The greatest obstacles to inner peace are disturbing emotions such as anger, attachment, fear, and suspicion while love and compassion and a sense of universal responsibility are the sources of peace and happiness."

-Dalai Lama

Now that I'm older, I recognize that some of the conflicting emotions and thoughts that my brother and I had as children from foster care are common to all people to a certain degree; only foster children are faced with these feelings to a far greater degree and often in isolation. Foster children typically endure horrific abuse, low self-esteem, and hopelessness, while lacking a healthy and consistent support system, all which veils one's ability to see past their traumatic pain. My brother and I were two prime examples. We lived extensively with the damaging emotions of anger, blame, fear, and procrastination throughout our lives. Had we been taught to smartly handle and resolve these emotions, we could've better understood the root of their inception and worked toward preventing any further damage to our lives. The self-doubt these types of experiences and emotions breed eventually eats away at any possibility of a healthy self-esteem unless it's negated by a progressive perspective. You see, negative thoughts produce poisonous emotions just as negative people create poisonous environments.

One day while stationed with the U.S. Navy in Puerto Rico, I recall crossing paths with a man who told me, "If you do something you love, you'll never work a day in your life," but for years, my mind couldn't comprehend that concept. All I had ever done was lived a life and worked a job I hated; how could it then be possible that I could feel like I'll never work? That is a pretty deep concept for a foster care survivor who had never experienced the feeling of freedom from any type of bondage. I just couldn't wrap my brain around what that meant. "Do what I love" . . . what would that be? At thirty-one, I had no idea who I was as a person. I had been miserable most of my life with fleeting moments of happiness followed by weeks, months, and years of confusion. And so the dreadful saga continued.

How does someone get to this point in life? To an outsider this may seem preposterous, but to a foster child who was never molded, it is an everyday reality. To never prepare a child's mind for his or her future potential is to leave that child to the very likelihood that he or she will be oblivious to their potential and life's purpose indefinitely.

After years of self-discovery and searching for personal meaning, I finally started to understand what I was doing wrong. I was eventually left alone to contemplate one question, one very embarrassing question-How could thirty years of my life pass me by before any light bulbs went off in my head? How could I not have a clue about how to create a happy life for myself after so many years? I'm not talking about that "outside appearance" of happiness that so many people hide behind. I'm talking about an inner peace, joy, and sense of understanding of why I was born. Could it be that there is something developed in children through the love and support of family that assists them in creating their vision despite their fears, which was never developed in me?

Yes! It's called a sense of security.

I was so blind and insecure about my own potential that I was oblivious to my previous acts of bravery. I viewed myself as a victim to this thing we call life. How could that be? I had survived my whole life without loving parents or anyone to consistently care for me. I spent part of my early childhood living destitute with no electricity, heat, water, or clean clothes, and later spent years bouncing around from house to house, sleeping wherever I could rest my head. I've walked the streets of NYC in the middle of the night before accepting the reality that I would have to sleep in the frightening train station because I had nowhere else to go. I've escaped a man stalking me on the Staten Island Ferry in the darkest of night, was held up at knifepoint, robbed of my jewelry on the way to school, and withstood the humiliating disgrace my grandfather subjected me to by regularly opening the shower curtain while I was naked so he could get sexually aroused. I've acclimated to dangerous situations and environments where I was unwelcomed and endangered, and have arrived on the other side unscathed for the most part. Yes, I was brave and capable of surviving. I was no dummy. But I had never reflected on my life with this perspective. Actually, I had never reflected at all. All of this led to me never learning the art of thinking or planning. I couldn't CREATE. I had only learned to hide and survive. I could not project out.

So for all my foster brothers and sisters out there, I suggest you take a good inventory of yourselves. Confide in people you trust. Ask them to give you an honest assessment of how they view you as a person, and to give you feedback concerning your talents, abilities, and shortcomings. There's an area of study called Emotional Intelligence (EQ) that I suggest you research. EQ will help you to gauge your ability to identify, assess, manage, and control your emotions and understand the emotions of others in order to be more successful in life. I've learned it's just as important to be able to gauge other people's emotions as it is to gauge and control my own. Our emotions underlie everything we do and say, so if you're living in anger because you're in foster care, or because you feel unloved, abandoned, or hopeless, if you are blaming the world because life dealt you a crappy hand, or because you just aren't happy, it is time to realize that those emotions need to be handled head-on for what they really are and how they were created. It's time to live authentically. Then you'll be able to do something positive about them and not blame anyone else. It does no one any good to live in a negative emotional state. Nothing positive can be built while having a negative outlook on life. After you learn why you're angry, who you're blaming, and what fear has been caused from your struggle, it's time to lay it out on the table and allow yourself the time to really feel and process those emotions. Don't push them down inside of you, don't ignore them, and don't live in them. Process and explore them. It is only by coming to peace with your history that you will ever be empowered enough to move through it to find clarity. Then and only then will you have the opportunity for real joy in your life because you will have learned the power of living authentically.