A Devout Helping Hand

By all rights, it should be a sunny morning in mid-June; instead, it is dark and drizzly. Upstairs, inside the red-brick walls of MacLaren Children’s Center, Los Angeles County’s emergency shelter in El Monte, a voice is heard working the phones, checking the usual group homes for openings. “Full house, huh? OK. . . . Hi. Just fine. Any openings? You still taking children 14 to 17? OK. Thanks.”

Oblivious to the worker, two women sit at a table nearby thumbing through the sad files of boys and girls whose parents had beaten them or sexually abused them or abandoned them, whose foster parents couldn’t cope, who have run away or been thrown out of group homes again and again.

Phyllis Willis, a coordinator of a new religion-based grass roots program, and Grace Peters, a Christian foster parent, are searching among the hardest-to-place children in the county. They’re trying to offer one of the few things these kids haven’t yet experienced--an unconditional commitment.

Willis has already eliminated the fire-setters, the chronic runaways and most of the sexual predators. The rest of the children might be semi-schooled, combative, depressed, provocative, profane or disturbingly charming. Peters has only a few questions about the girl she is about to meet. Who molested her? How did she get pregnant this time? What about this incident with the knife under the pillow?

If the county approves the placement and if, like all the rest, the girl agrees, she will become the 11th child since November to leave MacLaren through Home Connection, one of the nation’s first attempts to use religious organizations to provide homes and “wraparound” community services for the most troubled children in the system.

African American churches have taken the lead in the experimental program, which has signed up 200 potential foster parents through dozens of local churches. Several Latino Catholic parishes are also involved. Recruited through an unofficial network of friends and contacts, the parents are trained like other foster parents and are supervised by county social workers. But they also receive ongoing counseling from a county psychiatrist and additional support, such as respite care and crisis counseling, by a still-evolving team of paid workers and volunteers, coordinated by Willis. Unlike the shelter or a group home, Home Connection also taps into its network for one-on-one guidance and family support for kids as long as they want it.

While the program affects only a tiny sliver of the 70,000 children in the Los Angeles County system, it signals the type of shift to community that watchdogs and philanthropists say is essential to make overburdened child welfare institutions work for abused children separated from their parents. Home Connection targets MacLaren because it has become the catch basin for hundreds of older children whose families could not be patched up and who were never adopted. There are an estimated 300 children, ranging in age from 11 to 17, currently growing up in a revolving door between the shelter and group homes, two institutions recently condemned for substandard care in a grand jury report and a private study.

The mission exudes a sense of urgency: When the children turn 18, the county’s obligation tapers off. Without a safety net, they are expected to drift to the streets, perhaps into hospitals or jails.

“We’re down to the absolute hardest issue. What do you do with these kids?” asks Carole Shauffer, executive director of the San Francisco-based Youth Law Center, a national advocacy organization for children in out-of-home care. The group has been working on reform efforts in Los Angeles County after settling a lawsuit against the county for failing to monitor the children in its care.

Last fall, Shauffer proposed that Los Angeles County partner with religious groups, the last bastions of community in some devastated urban areas, to provide comprehensive services. Parents never came through for these children; neither have secular civil servants nor hourly shift workers who staff group homes and treatment facilities.

“It may take a belief in something higher than yourself to go through this experience with these kids,” Shauffer says.

Without a model, these pioneers are inventing the program as they go, and questions remain about how churches and governments can work together. Will the children be coerced into religious practices? Will the county’s safeguards remain intact? And what help will the faithful need to deliver what they promise?

No one doubts the task is daunting. Among the children who have been placed into Home Connection foster families, one girl with a history of prostitution has run off with a man arrested for pimping, another has been relocated to a respite home, and one boy is back at MacLaren.

“We don’t tell them it will be easy,” Willis says. “We tell them it will be worth it.”

Finding the Right Home

Tashauna Simon is scared.

A fast-talking 17-year-old with dark eyes, she is feeding her newborn, her second child, on a sofa in MacLaren’s “Pixie” ward for babies, listening to Willis’ news: There might be a home for the two of them, while a relative temporarily cares for her older child. If all goes well, it will be the last of more than 20 placements she’s had since she entered the system at age 10.

She knows that this may be her last chance to show the county she is stable enough to qualify for “transitional housing,” an apartment where she and her baby can live while she earns her GED and trains to be a nurse at a community college. What if it fails again? What if social workers take the babies? She doesn’t want her kids to go through what she’s been through.

The only problem, Willis tells her, is the word “assaultive” in her file.

Tashauna says she hasn’t been that way since she was 15.

“I’m a Christian,” she assures Willis. “I’ll be 18 in July. I don’t have time to fight and argue. I’m taking parenting and anger-management classes.”

On the other hand, she tells Willis, adults also need to meet the kids halfway. “We’ve been through a lot. Some parents describe their home one way, and when you get there, it’s totally different.”

A month later in mid-June, Tashauna is in her second Home Connection family. She has been moved from the Paramount home of 26-year-old Veronica Davis, a divorced single mother with a foster child, and sent to the Los Angeles apartment of another Home Connection foster mother, Vickie Bishop, who is a distant relative of Tashauna.

Davis says she and Tashauna argued over schedules and plans, chores and child rearing and when she would see her boyfriend, who lives in a group home. Davis says, “She called me a fat skanky bitch and said, ‘That’s why you don’t have your own kids. Nobody wants you.’ I said, ‘I’ve chosen to wait until I’m married and not have bastards.’ ”

When Tashauna pushed her out of a doorway during a later argument, Davis called the police. An emergency county social worker recommended Tashauna and her baby be separated.

“I’m only human,” Davis says. “I cannot deal with being disrespected and cursed out.”

Tashauna says she tried her best. “I’m still trying my best,” she says from a phone in Bishop’s house, where she says she is happier and more settled. “I’m not a bad person. I know I need counseling. I know that. I don’t have an explosive temper. I get mad. I say what’s on my mind. I should be able to speak about it. I’m a human being. The Lord gave me that gift to be outspoken. Maybe I should be a lawyer or something.”

She also says: “Half the time they treat the kids in the system like it’s their fault. Nobody wants to be in the system.

“I didn’t pick the family I was born into. I got that family. All I can do is make a different life for my two sons.”

When the dust clears, after meetings with county officials, including a psychiatrist and Home Connection staff, Tashauna and her baby remain together, with Bishop, who has taken in two other Home Connection teens. “She has a lot more experience,” Willis says. “And the family tie helps. It’ll work out.”

Authorities call these cases growing pains and learning experiences, not failures. When more children have been placed through Home Connection, both the county and the Stuart foundation will evaluate their efforts, through yet-to-be determined measures, and refine standards and procedures.

Voices From the Pulpit

When Peter Digre, director of Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services, heard Shauffer’s idea, the department was under fire again. MacLaren was overcrowded. A 12-year-old boy had died there from sniffing inhalants. A grand jury had found substandard conditions in many of the county’s 476 group homes. In one of them, another 12-year-old boy, placed there by the Probation Department, had been killed, apparently by two housemates.

“The more I studied these kids and their incredibly tragic lives, it was so obvious what a failure our whole approach of ever more intensive group homes was. What each and every one of them was desperate for was the unconditional commitment of a family,” he says.

Digre convened a group of city pastors, already part of the county’s community-based family preservation networks. The pastors, after a MacLaren tour brought tears to some eyes, embraced Digre’s challenge to put faith into action.

“These are our kids,” says the Rev. Larry C. Jackson, pastor of Gesthemene Christian Love Baptist Church in South Central Los Angeles. “They came from us. We either buried their grandmother, went to the hospital to see an aunt or uncle of theirs, went to the jail to see somebody. If we don’t do something to turn them around now, when they’re too old for MacLaren, they’ll be back on the streets in the community. They’ll be the ones stealing our cars, breaking into our homes. So we got to do something. We’ve got to find a way.”

San Francisco’s Stuart Foundation provided a three-year $500,000 grant to the Los Angeles project. Program coordinator Willis and four part-time recruiters were hired. A community council of pastors, ex-social workers, teachers and others was formed to help provide services.

Willis, a former employment manager and insurance operator, was developing her own programs in the projects when Jackson told her she ought to apply for the coordinator’s job because she belonged in the community. She says she knows now that this is where God wants her to be.

She would credit God, but most observers credit her drive and motivational know-how for the program’s momentum. The mother of two is at the hub of the action, recruiting churches and parents, making matches with kids, and trouble-shooting in the field. Good humored and intense, she attacks her mission seven days a week, around the clock, armed with a Bible, a pager and principles learned from her mentor, Christian insurance tycoon Arthur L. Williams: God first, never leave without referrals, and everyone needs a cause that sets them aflame.

People will fight, stay up late, do whatever it takes, work weekends, take no pay, if they’re fighting for a cause, Willis says. “What greater cause can you have than a human life?”

On Father’s Day, Willis drives nearly an hour to the Mission Boulevard Church of Christ in Ontario. She hopes to find more parents and resource people--especially men--with the right hearts.

While foster parents are paid up to $1,000 a month (the county’s “D rate” for the most difficult children), Willis rejects prospects who appear too interested in money or those whose pastors won’t participate or recommend them. She looks for churches that take people as they are, people who can relate to the kids’ circumstances, people like herself who believe in miracles, having seen faith turn prostitutes, drug addicts and alcoholics into PTA moms, businessmen and pastors. Many of the best prospects have been single mothers.

In a neat suit and low heels, Willis sits on a metal folding chair next to Brenda Jones, a recruiter who found the pastor Lionel Spears through work.

When Willis’ turn comes at the pulpit, she reminds the congregants that the church calls them to take care of children.

“We have to become that old-fashioned kind of small Southern town where your neighbors would call your mother or your grandmother when you acted up. They didn’t call a social worker.”

The congregants say, “That’s right.”

“The way it is now, some of these kids have no one. At 18, many of them leave the system ready for absolutely nothing.”

“That’s right.”

Five people, including a husband and wife from the Antelope Valley, take applications for licensing. The pastor signs up too.

Struggling With Parenthood

Some parents find that despite their best intentions, unconditional commitment is a promise they can’t keep.

Warner Spears, 14, thinks a while before he remembers how many homes he’s had since he was taken away from his mother and his grandmother in South Central Los Angeles. Four maybe.

That would include the Lancaster home of Joan Killen, a 58-year-old home health aide and foster mother of four, where he stayed for nearly a month before being sent back to MacLaren in mid-May.

Yeah, he thought it would be all right going to Joan’s, Warner says. “But her kids were like babies. They don’t act mature. I told her, I’m leaving. Your kids are retarded, stupid. They tattle too much. They lie too much.”

Small for his age and dressed in clean baggy pants, white T-shirt and huge shoes, Warner sits at a table at MacLaren rotating his wrist aimlessly, staring out the window into the blue mountains beyond El Monte and yawning. It has been three hours since the staff gave him psychotropic medication for hyperactivity.

Disarmingly direct, he denies stealing from one of Killen’s boys because if he had wanted to take money, he would have taken the whole $50. “A person like me, if I take your money, I’m gonna take all of it.”

By the way, is he going to get paid for this interview? he asks.

Killen, single and childless, has taken in 10 or 15 boys, since realizing three years ago that her calling was to help needy children. With the boys’ approval, she moved earlier this year to get them away from the drive-bys and helicopters in Inglewood. Warner loved it out there where they could shoot hoops at 9 at night, in a home that had a backyard with roses and a puppy.

And Joan loved him, she says. But Warner wouldn’t do right. When she caught him taking things, she would put him on punishment and he’d look at her like, “You’ve got to be kidding,” and walk out the door. One day when Killen took him with her on a business trip into Los Angeles, he ran back to his grandmother’s house, in a neighborhood so riddled with drugs and crime that Killen always prayed before she took him there for a visit.

He never thought this would happen, she says. “You know why? Because he’s so cute and he knows I love him. He always thought, I can still do what I do and she’s never going to send me back. The thing is, it’s not a one-way street. It’s give and take, and this child was only willing to take. I have other boys. I had to take into consideration the effect it was having on them. It’s a shame because there’s something there to save.”

Next time, she says, he’ll do better with a man in the family.

“We’ll find a home for Mr. Warner,” Willis says. “If Tashauna can change, anyone can.”

Even if she finds one, Warner says, nope, he won’t go. “It’s not me.”

Establishing Relationships

Why aren’t the children grateful? Why don’t they behave? Some foster parents are bewildered.

Those who work closely with foster children say intimacy can be particularly threatening since it raises old issues of trust and control. Betrayed by adults time after time, they will push every new relationship to see, “Will you betray me too, or are you the strong person I need?”

In some cases, they will reenact earlier abuse because they have identified with the aggressor, says Lynn E. Ponton, professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco, who has worked with abused and runaway teens. “They say it: They feel more powerful when abusing than when being victimized again.” She also believes the more severely traumatized may experience post-traumatic stress disorder in which “hypervigilant” sensitivity to slights progresses to the paranoid delusion that a family, no matter how loving, is out to get them.

Los Angeles psychiatrist Sam Smith, employed by the county to counsel Home Connection parents and children, has high hopes that new families and communities will “normalize” the teens.

Smith says the irony of the current system is that its huge caseloads, rule-bound institutions, labels and medications undermine what children need most--a psychic bond. Smith has worked in group homes and knows the kids don’t need more rules. Many don’t need labels or medication. They don’t even need therapy, he says. What they need are parents, and people they can talk to freely.

Friday evenings at Inglewood’s First Church of God, the Ghana-born therapist, in jeans and a cap, listens to the foster parents and explains in his earnest, clipped baritone that the behavior they might see--the stealing, the lying, the anger, even hearing voices--is an extreme but normal reaction to their backgrounds and the lack of good examples for balancing feelings, thoughts and actions.

The principle, he tells the parents, is to buy time so they can establish relationships. Relationships are the key.

The psychiatrists are certain that, unless children suffer from a personality disorder, they are capable of dramatic improvements. The father of UC San Francisco professor Ponton was abandoned by his parents on the streets of Chicago at age 10, lived in 22 boarding homes as a child before going on to college, graduating from law school and becoming vice president of an insurance company.

Janet Knipe, coordinator for the California Youth Connection, an advocacy group for current and former foster children, says successful survivors of the system universally credit the people in their lives who went the extra mile and created a family connection.

At the same time, they are often irritated at being matched up with a family just at the moment they’re about to be emancipated from foster care. At that point, all some want is a job and financial support.

“It’s just important that it’s not a very structured thing, that you don’t just meet somebody who says this is your family for life. The youth feel it’s a gentle thing when you bring people into your life. You get to know people over a long period of time,” Knipe says.

The therapists say parents should not be surprised if it takes six months for the children to start trusting an adult. They should not be surprised if it takes a year. Or more.

Much depends on the teen’s own maturity. Some just have to hit rock bottom, points out Janice Johnson, manager of the assessment center at MacLaren. “It could be religion, it could be a person. You see some mean stuff going on in the streets. Maybe their best friend is killed. Whatever it takes for the lightbulb to come on for these kids.

“The cycle of abuse is real intensive. The dynamics are massive. The myth is that you overcome this. You never really do.

“It’s a lifetime struggle for most of these kids.”

Learning to Be Dependent

Adeline Arroyo was 13 when the county separated her from her parents.

She ran away from two group homes and lived on her own for two years, earning rent for an apartment in Los Angeles by doing janitorial work for the manager. Finally, fed up, she turned herself in to police who, called to the building on an unrelated matter, knocked on her door by mistake.

When Home Connection found her at MacLaren, she was pregnant and had tested positive for cocaine.

It’s hard being a “child” in a home when you’ve been independent for so long, says the 17-year-old. Serious and quiet, she spreads out on the bottom bunk of her bed in her foster home on Martin Luther King Boulevard in Los Angeles, next to her 2-week-old baby, born drug free. The television on the dresser is turned to cartoons.

She agreed to go with Home Connection because hardly anyone wants a pregnant girl and because a foster home sounded better than a maternity facility. The church people turned out to be nicer than she thought. They gave her a baby shower. They opened her mind to education, helped her make a plan for her GED.

Three times a week, a county driver takes her to “Freedom 101,” Home Connection’s computer and mentoring class at the First Church of God--the sort of community base Willis hopes to establish at churches, mosques and synagogues throughout Los Angeles County. Through them, she has a summer job as a clerk in a health clinic. When she goes to work, her foster mother, Kimberly Brown, who runs a family day care, will watch the baby.

Not a lot of people help you from out of their heart, she says. It’s sort of a different experience.

Adeline feels most connected to Willis and recruiter-mentor Terri Foster, a nurse from Compton and mother of three, who was a pistol herself as a teenager. Foster 37, has smoothed over early unhappiness between Adeline and her foster mother, takes the Home Connection girls shopping and gives the new mothers baby care and relationship and career advice, the same advice she’d give her own kids. She and the girls are connected now, for better or worse. They are in her life, and she’s in theirs.

Two weeks after giving birth, Adeline returns to class. Arriving late, she sees Tashauna and her boyfriend and Christie Clark, whose father threw her out of his house because she was pregnant. New kids will be coming next week, but tonight there are more adults than teens. Willis, Foster, administrator and counselor Katie Burton, church teacher and computer instructor Dana Dudley; pastor Curtis Page from the Good News Prayer Center Church of God in Christ and Home Connection recruiter Bill McButts have come to see how they can help Tashauna’s boyfriend, who has joined the class. Not that they have answers, they say. Just give him some hope, something to believe in, a few more options.

Upstairs in the spartan rooms of the church whose fenced parking lot needs a security guard, these adults call her Sweet Adeline. They tell her she is an inspiration to others. As she walks through the rows of computers to take her seat, the rosy evening sunshine falls through the blinds. They applaud, and she smiles.