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Finding family: two couples bring stability to youth in care 
On any given Sunday, it’s business as usual in one Seattle home.
A teenager gets cooking tips in the kitchen, and company’s coming soon for dinner. Two young girls are taking turns playing puppy and owner in the living room. Everybody’s sharing what they liked most about their trip earlier in the day to the Pacific Science Center.
It’s snapshots like these, perhaps, that best define family. A woman who waits for the call from a girl who’s ready to come back home. That’s a mom.
The two people in the crowd who cheer a little louder than everyone else on graduation day. Those are undoubtedly parents.
A place to go back to anytime at all. That’s home.
It’s moments in time just like these that life partners Degale Cooper and Lisa Carscadden and Rich and Aaron Hooks Wayman create for foster children. Their stories are different. Cooper and Carscadden live on one coast. The Hooks Waymans live on the opposite coast. Each couple has cared for many different children in different foster care models, but collectively, they share passion and commitment for the families they nurture.
Here are their stories.
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Rich Hooks Wayman knew early on that he wanted to assist people who were disadvantaged. Raised in a very small rural Iowa town, this son of a school principal and part-time bookkeeper was taught the value of stewardship and giving back to the community. He grew up wanting to be a lawyer who represented people in poverty. He attended college and law school in Iowa and moved to Minnesota in 1992, where he got a job as a litigator for the Legal Aid Society of Minneapolis.
Like many state foster care programs, Minnesota struggles to find positive placements for children who identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or questioning their sexual identity (LGBTQ).
Rich was raising Christina, a cousin of his previous partner. His career had opened his eyes. He knew there were LGBTQ youth on the streets. He had helped launch a host home program to empower the city’s LGBTQ adult population to bring LGBTQ homeless youth into their homes to mentor them and help them transition into an independent living situation.
But it wasn’t enough.
Knowing the prospect of bringing foster children into a home was a family affair, he spoke to Christina about becoming a foster care family. They had plenty of room, and Rich knew Christina had the inclination to be supportive and open. She agreed.
He began the process and found that Minnesota is among the states that permits GLBT foster parents. The process took nearly a year, however, and Rich said that by the time he received his license, the GLBTQ children he had learned about had already been sent out of state, as there were no available local resources at the time.
Instead, he was called to care for one teenage girl. And then another. During it all, he met his life partner Aaron.
“What he got was me, two girls and two dogs. I made it very clear early on that I was looking for a life partner who enjoyed the concept of family and had the desire to be a part of one,” Rich said.
Over the course of the next five years, the couple helped raise four heterosexually identified girls, including Christina. Rich said the experience was positive and beneficial for them all, and Christina best articulated why.
“My first daughter helped illustrate why things worked. All had been raised by their mothers and had no fathers, really, or had been raped or abused by their fathers or their mother’s counterpart. For them to come into a home with one or two men who were nurturing was new—and good.
“My second daughter said, ‘You’re the first men I’ve ever known who have cared about me.’ What a huge statement. Not only did she need the permanency and stability of family, but we also taught her what a loving and trusting relationship can be.”
In their own way, Rich said, each of his girls have told him they immediately knew they were safe in Rich and Aaron’s home.
“When teenagers have lived their lives not being able to trust adults, they instinctually know how to check off certain types of threatening behavior. We didn’t exhibit them. They were safe. That layer was gone, and it made the transition that much easier.”
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