All these decades later, I can still remember the outrage I felt the first time I sat in a Colorado courtroom. I watched everyone from the attorney to the social worker to the judge ignore what was so obviously in the best interests of the toddler who was blind and developmentally disabled and whose future was, for all intents and purposes, up for grabs.
The young lawyer in me felt such despair. This tiny 2-year-old boy, who already had so many strikes against him, was about to be removed for no good reason from the foster family he had lived with and loved almost since birth. And they loved him back. And wanted him. But the judge decided otherwise. Against all common sense and with no basis in the law, the judge sent him to live with strangers. Not a single person objected. It was so cruel and inhumane that I thought my heart might stop.
My impulse was to try to stop this travesty. Unfortunately, I had no standing to speak in that Colorado courtroom. So, I walked out full of fury and determination to start an organization that would fight for foster children and put their legal rights front and center. In 1985, I founded the Children’s Legal Clinic, which later became the Rocky Mountain Children’s Law Center, the first nonprofit law firm for abused and neglected children.
My priority has always been the foster children who are basically invisible to the outside world (and often to the system that’s supposed to protect them), whose needs are often third or fourth in line or ignored entirely for the sake of expediency.
I’ve been at this a long time now, pretty much since I graduated from Rutgers Law School and went to Pittsburgh in 1970 to work at legal services and later its child advocacy unit.
I wish I could say what I witnessed in that early 1980s courtroom doesn’t happen anymore. But that would be wishful thinking. It still happens every day, all around the country, where nearly 370,000 children remain in foster care, including 3,448 in our state.
Each of those children deserves better. That should go without saying. But not enough people say it or believe it or are willing to do the hard work of manifesting it. There is endless data about children in foster care and most of it isn’t promising.
Girls in foster care are more likely to become pregnant than their peers in regular homes. Foster kids are far more likely to drop out of high school and to forego college. Suffice it to say, the pipeline from foster homes to homelessness can seem like a steel trap.
I think we’re all born with great potential, and the God-given right to live up to it. I feel blessed to be able to do what I can.
Still, I know it’s hard to care about what you don’t know about, and secrecy couched as privacy rights of minors surround the foster care system. I am trying to bring their situations and experiences to light, to make everyone understand that the better their trajectories, the better for all of us, not just economically but also societally.
In 1981, I left Pennsylvania for Colorado, where I’ve worked with thousands of foster children. I’ve launched prevention programs and partnerships, co-chaired national committees and mentored advocacy organizations, and the center I started has helped alter the course of at least 15,000 children’s lives. I’m also not pretending it has been close to enough.
That’s why I’m still in the fight five decades later to improve the lives of foster children. But I also realized I needed a new approach. I was tired of asking permission to help instead of just helping.
As a result, I founded another nonprofit organization, Cobbled Streets, to give children some joy and a bit of what was missing in their lives. It could be a new bicycle, the stick and skates to play hockey on a high school team (and thus create a sense of belonging), or a camping trip involving multiple foster families that brings brothers and sisters together again. Now I get to listen to kids’ dreams and needs and, well, do something concrete and immediate for them.
I can’t take away their past pain or eliminate all future struggles. But I can end some of the waiting. And that’s what foster children do: wait. Wait for their parents to get the drug and alcohol treatment they need, wait to learn where they’ll be placed, wait to make a real connection, wait, wait, wait on a future they can’t even conjure.
I hate waiting. Always have. Doing something matters. By taking action, I believe one person can change the world, even if it’s the world of one child at a time.
Shari F. Shink, Esq., is the founder of the Rocky Mountain Children’s Law Center and executive director of Cobbled Streets, which is focused on changing the lives of foster and homeless children.
