California Angels

Not the baseball team. The angels I am talking about are those who help a group of often forgotten people. They make up 65% of California's prison population. They comprise 40% of my state's homeless shelter population. And 98% of them never attend college. They are former foster kids, sometimes called throwaway kids. Those children, who through no fault of their own, end up as wards of the court. Their parents cannot or will not care for them. (There is often a fine line between unable and unwilling.) So they end up in foster care, a lot of them going from one home to the next. Then they turn 18, the money the foster family collects for them runs out, and they are abruptly out on their own. Some slip through the cracks.

Santa Barbara City College has 85 students who are former foster children, and the school's Foundation just received $5,000 from Southern California Edison (the local electric company) which will be used to help these young adults get an education.

Then a little further south in the Orange county community of Lake Forest, we find Lori Burns, a former foster kid who is now a technology executive. Burns founded The Teen Project (www.teenproject.com.) It all started with her purchasing a home where young women who had aged out of the system could stay as they transitioned into the adult world.

Actually, it all started a lot earlier than that. When Burns was three years old, and her father began using her as a punching bag.  Then her mother took off, and left alone with her father, life for Burns went from bad to worst. She spent time in a facility for the criminally insane, after her father falsely accused her of trying to kill him. She was gang raped. She turned to drugs. She has written a book, Punished for Purpose, with all the details. But the long story short of it, is Burns turned her life around but never forgot what it was like to suffer. She now helps young people who are walking that same painful path that was once hers.

Burns survived, then went on to thrive. Happy, sober and with a six-figure income, she was by anyone's definition a success. She could have gotten on with her life, relieved and filled with joy to have her suffering behind her. Perhaps she could have written a check now and then to a charity  No one would have blamed her for wanting to move on. No one would have blamed her for not looking back.

Yet the thing about suffering is, it changes us. Some suffer and go on to inflict pain on others. Some suffer and move on, silently trying to forget. And then there are those angels who earn their wings, the ones who suffer and allow it to transform them. They reach out to those walking that same painful path, and they tell them there is something better ahead. But they don't just point them in that direction. They take each one by the hand as if to say, Walk with me. I'll show you the way.

Susan