Twenty years ago this month, Redwood Children’s Services placed its first foster child with a foster family. Camille Schraeder, the executive director and founder of what she expected to be “just a little foster family agency,” had just received her license on April 22, after taking out a line of credit on her new house to lease office equipment.
She had just left Trinity School, a facility for troubled youth under the Southern California parent company Guadalupe Homes. Trinity was based on a corporate model that left her reluctant to invest large sums of money in machinery when children were in need. She wanted to provide a more therapeutic environment for young people who were displaying “what we know today as trauma behaviors.”
She cited a recent CDC/Kaiser study on adverse childhood experiences, which links childhood traumas and food and housing insecurities to lifelong health problems, including substance abuse, asthma, hypertension and heart conditions.
“I know what that’s like,” she said, explaining that she and her twin sister were removed from her mother’s care as infants and placed in a foster home for the first crucial four or five years of her life.
“I’m ambivalent about kids being with their families at all costs,” Schraeder said. “In theory, that’s a beautiful thought…if we do really great, help the whole family, then that’s OK, but if we just say, ‘you are better with your family,’ are they better off?”
Reflecting on the high quality of care she received in her own foster home, she added that “people didn’t work on reunification in 1962 in Idaho.”
Nevertheless, she believes that “If we intervene early and we intervene well, you can actually change the trajectory on the effects of childhood abuse and neglect.” To that end, RCS provides various ‘Wrap’ programs, to connect families to community services and create a plan for avoiding the criminal justice system or residential programs.
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