Episode 502 | Foster care, funds, and food: Four guests discuss their lives and work in these areas

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The second episode kicks off with our hosts sharing their stories of foster care and adoption. Co-host Carol Jenkins adopted her son, Mike, after fostering him when his family was disrupted. 

Co-host David Ambroz shares his story on the other side of the foster care system: after living in homelessness for 11 years with his mother, he found “much of the abuse but less of the love” that his mother provided, with one exception in all his placements. 

David initially didn’t want – and in many places, as a gay man, wasn’t allowed – to foster children, but a teen he was mentoring was in need of a foster family, and David became that family for him. 

“This youth crime story I’m looking at is a foster care story.”

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Their conversation is a great introduction to our first guest, Claudia Rowe. She talks to Carol and David about her book Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care.

“I knew it as data and research, and suddenly there it was in front me.” 

The data shows:

• 59% of kids who age out of foster will be locked up by age 26. 
  
  • Many of them have already been in juvenile detention while they are in foster care

• $34 billion every year in the U.S. for outcomes that are mostly homelessness and incarceration, which are even more expensive systems

But in front of Claudia, in a courtroom on trial for murder, was Maryanne. 

• Maryanne had a broken adoption and was a chronic “runner” from her foster placements
• At her last placement, she had just turned 16. She ran away and met up with a 21-year-old man who she would eventually shoot in the head. 
• At her trial, she was charged as an adult. Her defense team argued that Maryanne’s experience in foster care bears some responsibility for what she did. The judge agreed even as he sentenced her to 19 years in prison: longer in prison that she had been alive.

“Foster care is a housing system. It needs to be reimagined as a healing system.”

We can do that by: 

• Encouraging kinship care: The government should give the financial support to children’s families instead of to strangers in order to keep them with the family
  
  • Some states are certifying family members as foster parents for the specific child in their family. 
• Providing guaranteed basic income for foster children who age out of the system
• Funding quality parenting initiatives to better recruit, train, and match foster parents with foster children

Claudia wrote this book “for people who don’t know anything about foster care.” Get it here.

Fiscal and physical health in Black women

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Dr. Tiffany Younger joins us in studio to discuss her research. She has found that 70% of Black women are sole or primary breadwinners in their households, even though they’re making pennies on the dollar, making it difficult to obtain assets and thus grow wealth. 

When discussing the pay gap or wealth gap, she says: “I’m interested in what Black women want that might not be what white men have.” 

This idea led her to define wealth in these communities, shifting to participatory research, a paradigm where those she’s studying are her co-collaborators, not her “subjects.”

She found that to Black women, wealth means: 

• Wellness: not just making more money if the environment is toxic
• Agency: Even high-earning Black women still feel limited in their choices
• Community: Wanting the people around them doing well 

Particularly in the wellness space, Dr. Younger discusses the high rates of chronic illness among Black women. That issue touched her personally: Dr. Younger shared that when she was 3, she lost her biological mother to chronic illness. 

Typical health initiatives focus on food and diet, which asks patients to control behavior, but it doesn’t take into account “weathering,” which is the additional stress of existing as a Black woman in a racist, sexist, etc. society. This wear and tear is responsible for bad health outcomes.

Liberation as a scientific framework

Dr. Younger started Liberation For Us, a project dedicated to addressing the data gap between race, gender, the economy, and health. Through this project, she collaborates with community-based organizations to understand, evaluate, and examine the relationship between the economy and health at the intersection of race and gender. Contact Dr. Younger via her website.

The architecture of baby bonds

David Radcliffe, from The New School’s Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, breaks down what baby bonds are and how they can close the wealth gap in this country.

“Money matters and having it matters more.”

What are baby bonds? Publicly funded and managed trust accounts for babies born who are covered by Medicaid. They're automatically enrolled into program where $3,200 is put into an account that is managed and invested by state treasurer. Over the course of the child’s life, it grows to between $11,000-20,000. 

That money can be used for one of four wealth-building activities:

1. Buy a home
2. Start/invest a business
3. Put in retirement
4. Use toward post-secondary education

Connecticut is the first state in the country to take this from an academic idea to a legislative policy. In three years, 50,000 babies will have received a baby bond in that time. While that money is not released to the recipients until they are age 18, the idea of having that nest egg creates hope and optimism among the families, leading to better physical and mental health outcomes.

Balancing long-term thinking with immediate need through the “Four Core” strategies: 

1. Baby bonds: meaningful seed capital for the future
2. Direct cash: Given directly to families in stressful and expensive early months after birth of a child
3. Direct material support: Providing directly diapers and other items babies need
4. Maternal health support in the early months of a child’s life

A note on the 530A accounts (nicknamed Trump accounts) becoming available July 4

• These accounts are a type of IRA, which you may be familiar with as a type of retirement account.
• This investment vehicle will seed $1,000 from the federal government into an account for a minor. Friends, family, and philanthropists can fund up to $5,000 per year.
• The drawback of these 530A accounts are: 
  
  • The need to self-enroll (not automatically enroll)
  • The child and parent need Social Security Numbers
  • The power of these accounts comes from the family’s ability to contribute to them

The Purple Apron Pantry is paving the way for colleges

Food insecurity among college students is at all-time high, and Katherine Ames is helping Hunter College tackle the problem head-on. Students can come by and get free groceries.

The pantry is open six days a week to all CUNY students, and students can drop in without having to make an appointment. Students can come once a day and have no need to provide “evidence” that they can’t afford food or are experiencing food insecurity. 

In addition to shelf-stable foods, there are also halal and kosher options, as well as refrigerated items like milk, juice, as well as fresh produce and eggs. They also sometimes have household goods and pet food to help support students with pets.