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Just listen: three young adults reflect on their life in care 
Like most young people who have experienced foster care, Maggie, Captain, and Kathryn have been uprooted and moved through courtrooms, group homes, and foster families. Each move comes at a cost. They lose friends and mentors; they fall behind in school. And the cost is the ability to envision a successful future outside foster care.
But a knack for survival and the blessing of loving, thoughtful, caring adults in their lives also have helped these young people forge a sense of identity they carry proudly out into the world. How can we change the child welfare system in ways that will help lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth grow into healthy adults? Listen.
Maggie Tuazon
Common knowledge might dictate that youth are always better off with a foster family than they are in a group home. But when a family fails to accept the identity of the youth they’re charged with fostering, a group home can be a positive alternative, providing peer and mentor connections youth need to grow and mature.
This is one of the surprising facets of Maggie Tuazon’s story.
At the age of 15, Maggie hadn’t come out as a lesbian; doing so to her birth family was unthinkable. When she was 15, Maggie left her home because of abuse and neglect, but her first foster parent didn’t feed her for three days. In another foster home, Maggie clashed with a family who rejected her lesbian identity on religious grounds.
When she entered a group home, Maggie didn’t feel more supported—she just felt left alone. This, however, was a welcome change from what she had experienced so far.
“I met many different people in group homes,” recalls Maggie. “And they came from many different cultural backgrounds. I thought hard about who I was because I was in the foster care system. I knew another girl who cut her hair short, and I thought, if she could do that, I could do it, too.”
Maggie’s positive assessment of her group home experience comes with several serious caveats, but the emancipation specialist who took a real interest in her provided her with a permanent connection she carried into adulthood. It was a mentor who finally made the difference for Maggie Tuazon.
“I’m still in touch with Kate, my emancipation specialist. She supported me when I joined the California Youth Connection. After I moved out to Fairfield, she even picked me up and drove me all the way to Oakland for our CYC meeting, 40 miles away. No one else would do that,” says Maggie, who has been out of foster care for a year but still knows Kate’s only a phone call away—and ready to offer support.
After becoming involved in the California Youth Connection, Maggie found her voice and her passion. Now she advocates for youth in foster care. “The foster care system has become more open to listening to youth,” observes Maggie. “And we’re getting better at communicating and telling the adults in child welfare that we deserve the best, just like their own children.”
Maggie recently met with Governor Schwarzenegger after he signed legislation to improve the lives of youth in foster care. One bill had particular significance for Maggie: Assembly Bill 1979 helped eliminate barriers to volunteers interested in becoming foster care mentors.
When she testified at the press conference, Maggie said, “If I didn’t have my mentor, I wouldn’t have been as invested in my life... My mentor was the only person I could call in the world. Anything and everything that I worried about, I would call my mentor and she would be there. Other foster youth deserve mentors, too.”
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