Social activist and former foster care youth Shenandoah Chefalo was forced to move 50 times during her childhood, and that experience coupled with her ideas to improve the foster care system that she survived resulted in her book, “Garbage Bag Suitcase.”
The book, which took over four years of research and writing to complete, describes Chefalo’s dysfunctional upbringing and journey through the foster care system. She also offers insight into the problems and potential solutions surrounding foster care, and will be presenting her thoughts on the topic in Brownstown Township on Aug. 15.
Chefalo worked in a law office focusing on criminal defense and divorce matters for almost 20 years, and was moved to write the book after noting a link between her clients and time spent in foster care.
According to Chefalo, there are approximately 1.6 million prisoners in the United States and about 1.2 million of them have spent time in foster care.
“I started researching foster care statistics and was just blown away by all of the negative stuff I was seeing,” she said. “It wasn’t just with incarceration, but it became with homelessness, with teen pregnancy, with government assistance and with substance abuse. At the base of that is trauma — what happened. We don’t want to address it because it’s scary and it’s hard.”
[For more of this story, written by Keith Salowich, go to http://www.thenewsherald.com/a...f3368bd787163273.txt]
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