The Question That Changes the Answer

For years I have been quietly playing small in my own story. I have brought you experts and foster parents and former foster children, and I have let their voices carry the weight, because it felt safer than standing all the way up in my own. But there is a Muhammad Ali quote I keep returning to: impossible is just a word people throw around who believe the life handed to them is their only choice. What if instead they believed in the power to change it? So this month I am stepping fully into the conversation, and I am starting with the question that is the whole heartbeat of Fostering the Summit. If I put one child in front of you and told you their story, and asked you to help that one, you would say yes. Almost every one of us would. So why can't we do that same thing for the ones we simply cannot see?

Here is what most people never learn until it is too late. When a child in foster care turns eighteen, they age out. The state is no longer their guardian, and if they are not in a long term placement, they are truly on their own. No halfway house waiting. No guaranteed door. Often not even a single adult to list as an emergency contact on a job application. Think about that against your own eighteenth year, or your child's, and how many times they called for advice or a shoulder to lean on. These kids have no one to call. And we act surprised when the cycle repeats, when a young person walks right back to the only people who ever knew their name even if those people were never safe, because at least there they are seen. Fifty percent of all children who age out are homeless within one year. Have you ever been one of the people who complained about the homeless crisis in your town? These are not separate stories. They are the same story, and we keep asking why nothing changes while doing the exact same thing over and over again. We keep putting duct tape on a wound that needs bypass surgery, and then we wonder why it will not heal. We recruit more homes every ten or fifteen years, but not better training, not more support, and so foster families burn out in twelve to eighteen months, as fast as they signed up. Chad and I fostered for fifteen years, and I watched that cycle turn more than once.

Fostering the Summit is not about waiting until a child ages out to help. It is about the two, three, four years before that moment, when we still have time to build stability, to give a teenager tools for the complex trauma adults left on them, to let them feel adventure and awe through a child's eyes for the first time, and to help them see that the belief handed to them was never theirs to carry. It would be easy to say six or eight children at a time will never move a national number, so why bother. But that math is exactly the trap. Systematic change never happens in a blink. It happens in ripples, in a couple hundred people becoming a couple thousand becoming two hundred thousand, each one saying yes, I will. So I am not asking you to open a nonprofit or become a foster parent, though you can. I am asking you to sit with one question until it gets brave enough to move you. Would you do it for one? Because if one child standing in front of you is worth everything, then so is the one you cannot see. And if enough of us answer yes, there is not a single statistic in foster care we could not rewrite.

Contact Corree or find out more about Corree and learn about all the ways she does not choose to stay in one lane go here: https://correeroofener.com/

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Until next time, keep shining bright!

- Corree