What's New
Spotlight Feature
A Foster Mom Tries to Help Her Son – and Hundreds More – Find Permanence
by Martha Shirk
Jeff Bodner, Celeste Bodner and Seth Wendzel
Unlike many of the 25,000 youth who "age out" of foster care each year, Seth Wendzel, 20, of Seaside, Ore., has a safety net.
Before he was discharged from foster care at age 18, Seth and his foster parents, Celeste and Jeff Bodner, entered into a "Permanency Pact" that formalized the couple's commitment to him. The pact states explicitly what the Bodners will provide for Seth, from educational assistance to spiritual support to help with money management to a home for the holidays.
Entering into the pact allayed Seth's concerns about his future. "I don't know where I would be without these guys," says Seth, a student at Oregon State University in Corvallis.
Convinced that individualized Permanency Pacts could benefit many other youth, Seth and Celeste have taken steps to help their idea spread. Since last year, Celeste has been disseminating the Permanency Pact on the web site of FosterClub, the nonprofit organization she founded in 1999 to link youth in foster care around the country. And early this spring, she briefed several dozen social workers at Casey Family Services on the pact's potential for helping youth in foster care think about what supports they need from adults. In the Spring 2007 edition of its quarterly Voice Magazine, Casey Family Services described the Permanency Pact as an "innovative approach."
Some child-welfare professionals have expressed concern that the Permanency Pact doesn't provide as legally secure a connection for the youth as adoption, but others are excited about it. "When I saw it the first time, I thought, 'This is the piece that's been missing,'" said Dorothy Ansell, a youth transition expert who is assistant director of the National Resource Center for Youth Services. "We watch way too many young people walk out the door with plenty of promises from people, but nothing tangible that they can count on. This fills the void."
The Permanency Pact grew out of Celeste's professional and personal experiences. Besides being executive director of FosterClub, she is a member of a state task force on permanence and was the foster mother to Seth and two other boys who aged out of care.
Celeste first began thinking about how to facilitate family-like relationships between youth in foster care and adults while screening the angst-ridden postings to www.FosterClub.com and its sister web site, www.FYI3.com (the latter, aimed youth 14 and older, received start-up funds from the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative). Many of the youth who wrote in to the web site worried about whom they would be able to count on once they aged out of care. "I saw so many kids coming out of care with anxiety disorders," Celeste says. "It's like flying without a safety net."
Then, in 2004, Celeste joined a state work group charged with developing administrative guidelines for the assignment of permanency goals for youth who were not going to be reunified with their parents or adopted. "The group was fairly adamant that the onus was on the state to help youth develop permanent connections," Celeste says. "I came to the realization that there was probably going to be room for a tool that could be used to facilitate communication around permanence."
Meanwhile, on the home front, one of Celeste's older foster sons, who has developmental disabilities, was struggling with the transition to adulthood. And as Seth entered his senior year in high school, he began to get anxious about his future once foster care ended. "My whole senior year, I was thinking about where I was going to go to school, how am I going to pay for school, how am I going to get there, stuff like that," he recalls.
Celeste and her husband always had told Seth that they regarded him as a member of their family. But Seth didn't really know what that meant. "It's always hard to know, 'How far are these people going to go for me if I need help?'" he says. "That's a question in a lot of youths' minds. This isn't a blood relationship. I didn't know how far the rubber band would stretch."
Mindful both of Seth's individual dilemma and the lack of adult support reported by many other youth who age out of care each year, Celeste began drafting the Permanency Pact. Her goal was to produce a simply written document that a responsible adult could sign to formalize his or her commitment to a youth who was about to age out of foster care.
Celeste had plenty of ideas about what kind of supports a youth might need after leaving care, but she asked Seth and another former foster son, Jake, to help develop the list. They quickly came up with some basics – a home for the holidays, an emergency place to stay, a co-signer on a loan, a place to store stuff.
But Seth and Jake also came up with some needs that Celeste admits she might not have thought of herself: spiritual support, inclusion in social activities, and help finding community resources. "Jake and I just thought about our own situations and what we needed," Seth says. "They're the kind of things that probably every kid in our situation thinks about."
By the time the Permanency Pact (PDF, 2.6MB) was finished, it included 45 suggested supports. Among some of the others: a place to do laundry, use of a computer and phone, housekeeping tips, help with apartment move-in, relationship counseling, help with legal troubles or drug and alcohol addiction, and an emergency place to stay.
Celeste plans to develop a toolkit or training protocol to guide the use of the Permanency Pact. She envisions a day when caseworkers all over the country use the Permanency Pact to guide discussions between youth and the adults in their lives about what they can expect from each other when foster care ends.
"It's important that people who enter into a Permanency Pact don't do it lightly," she says. "Both parties should discuss the tradeoffs and the expectations. I think it would be very useful to involve a facilitator. The idea is that the youth identifies the support he needs, and the adult comes in and says, 'This is what I can do.' Formalizing the Permanency Pact with Seth made me more aware of the need to not leave things open for interpretation."
For some youth, entering into a Permanency Pact actually could serve as a stepping stone to adoption, she believes. "My gut tells me that this would actually lead to more adoptions," she says. "What I've found with youth is that reading this document helps them realize why they need permanence. For the youth who are saying no to adoption, we can try to get them to say yes to a Permanency Pact, keeping in mind that the end zone could still be adoption."
Seth would like judges to require that youth in foster care who aren't being reunited with their families or adopted enter into a Permanency Pact with at least one adult, and possibly several. "It should be mandatory," he says. "I think that a lot of youth are confused about how far certain people will go for them. They think that because they have a close friendship, that person will be there for them when the time comes. But that's not always true. I think it's important to have it on paper.
"I knew that the Bodners cared for me, but the Permanency Pact reinforced where they would go for me. I had a rough time my first year in college, and there were times when I worried about Celeste and Jeff giving up on me. But they didn't."
