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Former foster kids create traditions

By ERNEST HOOPER
Published November 26, 2006

Ask me about my favorite Christmas memories, and my thoughts don't turn to electric football sets or Lincoln Logs.

I think of the young adult days I spent driving home to Tallahassee from Gainesville. I would gas up my Plymouth Champ, listen to the Temptations' Silent Night and the Carpenters' Merry Christmas, Darling and thank the heavens I had a place to call home.

Holidays just mean more when you're making the transition from adolescence to adulthood. The world seems a little colder, so holidays seem a little warmer. Simple things resonate in a new way: like watching everyone take that post-meal nap on the couch during the football game.

But I've come to realize that you don't have to have traditional families to have family traditions.

A program in Tampa called Connected by 25 strives to help young people who have "aged out" of the state's foster care system become connected to the community by the time they turn 25. Wards of the state must live on their own when they turn 18, even if they are still in high school.

Talk about a cold world.

Consider 20-year-old Ashley Kyle, who had to find a place to live instead of concentrating on prom dresses and Grad Nite when she turned 18. Was she scared, angry, depressed?

"All of the above," Kyle said. "I was scared because I didn't want to be out there on my own, angry at my biological parents for not being there. In a sense, I was happy to get from under the state's care so I didn't have to listen to someone else tell me what to do, but most of all, I was scared."

I expected to write about how these teens won't have the kind of memories I hold dear.

Instead, these kids - too resilient to stand idly by and feel sorry for themselves - are making their own memories and helping others along the way.

Every Thanksgiving and every Christmas, a group of 50 or so gather at the Connected by 25 resource center, a renovated two-story home on Palm Avenue in Tampa Heights.

"Being in foster care, you really don't have a family because your family wasn't there for you," said Kyle, who attends Hillsborough Community College, just bought her first car (a '94 Toyota Corolla), and works at the resource center.

"It is just like being around family," she said. "They are my family. ... We're all each other have. There is no one else I would rather be with, no other place I would rather be."

Some of the girls spend the night before the holiday cooking turkey and whipping up meals for the next day. They order pizza, watch movies and have the kind of sleepover they could never enjoy in foster kids. State rules prevented them from staying overnight with friends unless that child's parents agreed to undergo a security check.

The next day, turkey and trimmings are served, and the participants all give thanks for people in their lives who truly care.

There are more than 400 students in Hillsborough County who have aged out of the system, and across the state, 800 teens age out every year. It's a group that needs support on so many levels: housing, education, employment. Connected by 25 can be reached at (813) 228-0731 or at www.cby25.org. It helps in those areas and others.

But if they did nothing else but give these kids a place to call home for the holidays, I would sing their praises.

That's all I'm saying.

[Last modified November 25, 2006, 23:51:13]