Hello, we’re Kathey and Rob Raskin of Las Vegas and we know that according to the Department of Health and Human Services there are almost 13,000 children in foster care in Michigan. Nationally, there are about 400,000 children in foster care on any given day. What we don’t know is how many get “lost” in foster care.
One Traverse City-based author and advocate knows how easily that can happen. Shenandoah Chefalo put herself into foster care when she was 13 to escape her abusive parents. Before too long she realized that if she disappeared, no one would care or come looking. Now, she’s leading a grassroots project called #4600AndCounting, to help find those lost children. Chefalo spoke with Stateside about the “lost” children of foster care.
Growing up, Chefalo lived with her mother and had moved over 50 times before she graduated from high school. She remembers a lot of mental illness, drug abuse and addiction, and a great deal of men entering and exiting foster her lives. She assumed foster parents would be the best the state had to offer. She realized that foster care presented several of the same issues she had experienced before.
When she turned 18, she was removed from the system, but paid her foster parents to house her until she graduated. Chefalo was accepted to Michigan State University but realized that, if she went missing, she still had no one in her life who would come looking.
#4600AndCounting, a petition on Change.org she created, is designed to help the 1.1% of the child welfare system who go missing annually. An article she read about three girls in Kansas who had gone missing and state senators leading a hearing into their disappearance disturbed Chefalo because it seemed to her that politicians didn’t care. She contacted a Toronto-based homeless youth advocate and they talked about the lack of response.
The petition is about changing the response process. She wants to put create a safety kit for children going into foster care which would include a current photograph, a DNA swab, and medical and dental information. The issue is extremely serious to Chefalo. She’s quoted with saying, “It’s a proven statistic. We know that a lot of the kids that disappear from foster care wind up in human trafficking and human sex trafficking rings and organizations.”
It’s programs like this and people like her, and us, who can keep our children safe from these horrible outcomes. We, Kathey and Rob Raskin, aim to stop DHR corruption throughout the nation. If you have a complaint, please log it on our main page now.