Family Members

Denise Royal – adoptive mother

Denise Royal was single and looking for the right person to start a traditional kind of family, when she saw a Wednesday’s Child segment in 2001. She watched the teenager featured, and thought, ‘I have an extra room. She could live here.’… (read more in The Family Story)

Christina– 21 years old

• First child to be adopted by Denise
• 14 when she was adopted
• Denise found Christina in ACS ‘Blue Book’
• Had a baby girl, Savannah, in 2009, whom Denise cares for now
• Currently enrolled in Brooklyn Educational Opportunity Center to complete her GED

Crystal – 19 years old

• Adoption is currently in process
• Denise met Crystal because she is Christina’s younger sister
• She was ‘part of the family’ for years before she asked Denise to be her mother
• Crystal has developmental disabilities
• The plan is for Crystal to live with Denise and her family full time by the end of the year
• Denise is helping Crystal to explore vocational programs to start in the new year
• Crystal wants to take a dance class

Savannah – 2 1/2 years old

• Christina’s daughter
• Denise was present at her birth
• Denise has custody and cares for her full-time

Elijah – 21 years old

• Met Denise when she needed help moving to a new apartment in 2011
• Aged out of foster care with a job, apartment and car and lost them all in a matter of months
• Was couch surfing when he met Denise, but she didn’t know
• Currently enrolled in a Culinary Arts course at Kingsborough Community College

Family Story

Denise Royal was single and looking for the right person to start a traditional kind of family, when she saw a Wednesday’s Child segment in 2001. She watched the teenager featured, and thought, ‘I have an extra room. She could live here.’ When Denise called for more information, she received a package including materials from You Gotta Believe, the only adoption agency focusing on older children. Denise called You Gotta Believe to find out more about the girl on television. She learned that the girl had been placed, and was encouraged her to consider other teens. The agency sent 14 profiles of children waiting for parents – Christina was #3. That’s how Denise found Christina, “a random kid in the City’s Blue Book.”

Christina was 14 when she met Denise, and barely weighed 90 pounds. At their first meeting Christina was very shy and heavily medicated. Her social worker did all of the talking. At the end of their meeting the worker said to Christina, “Is there anything you want to ask Denise?” and Christina blurted out, “Are you good?”

It took years for Denise to understand what that question really meant. Christina had come into care at the age of 2, and by 14 she had moved 6 times and endured a great deal of trauma. When her current foster home was going to close, Christina needed a permanent place to belong and Denise expressed interest in adopting her. The social worker asked Christina what she thought and she responded, “I’ve never had a white lady before, I guess I’ll give it a try.” Christina moved in with Denise in July 2004.

From the start, Denise facilitated visits between Christina and her sister, Crystal, 12 who was living in a group home. Crystal had a big personality. She was loud and liked to draw attention to any situation she was involved in. As time went on, Crystal was around for every Christmas, holiday, and random weekend. She was becoming part of the Royal Family, though dynamics between the sisters were sometimes volatile, which made Denise hesitate on going further with permanent plans.

When Christina turned 18 she ran away during an argument with Denise and came back a week later announcing she was pregnant. Denise asked Christina to come home where they could handle the situation together, and they welcomed Baby Savannah on 18 January 2009. Christina suffered from post partum depression and was not able to care for Savannah very well. She was eventually hospitalized for an extended stay and Denise assumed responsibility for Savannah.

After Christine moved out, Crystal continued to visit Savannah and Denise. One day on a visit she asked Denise, “Why can’t you to be my mother? You are already my family.” She looked at Christina’s old bed and claimed it, “I want this bed.” Denise had been advocating for Crystal for years and knew the plan was to discharge from foster care and put her in an adult OMR/DD facility now that she was 19.

“When a child asks you to be her mother, there is no higher honor.” With the adult placement looming, Denise fought to adopt Crystal and bring her home. She is now living with the Royals 10 days a month as a transitional plan, with the intention of living there full time by the end of the year, when she can start a new vocational program and take a dance class like she has “always wanted”.

With the Royal Family growing, Denise needed a bigger place and moved the children from 15th street to 153rd Street in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem. Denise needed help with the move and called another adoptive mom to see if any of her sons wanted to earn some money moving boxes. One son showed up, saw how much there was to do, and he called his ‘brother from the group home’ Elijah, who had recently aged out of care. Elijah had been discharged from foster care with a job, apartment and a car. Within months he lost his job, then the apartment and finally the car. Now at 21 years old, Elijah was couch surfing with only a few garbage bags of belongings stashed at the home of a distant relative.

Elijah and Denise clicked right away. Over the next two weeks, she kept calling him to help with the unpacking and learned more about his situation. It was Crystal who first said, “I like him. If he wants to stay in my bed when I’m not here, he can.” Elijah was very reliable and showed up every day, and then all of a sudden one day he disappeared. Denise was worried and did everything she could to find him. A few days later, he resurfaced after being taken in by the police and released without charges – he had done nothing wrong. When she heard the story, Denise was furious, “If anything ever happens to you again- You tell the police that you need to call your mother – or whatever you want to call me Denise, Auntie, Mom – but you’re going to have to call me.”

It was not long before she told him, “We have room for you here and you are welcome, if you can stand all of us girls.” No one had ever claimed Elijah before. He moved in within a month. Denise took Elijah clothes shopping, bought him furniture, and got his closet set up. To build his skills, she helped him enroll in a Culinary Arts Course at Kingsborough County College and study for his driver’s license. But of all these new activities, Eljiah’s favorite thing to do is hang out at home with his family.

In Denise’s words, “If you want to know about my family, it’s a unique collection of one-of-a-kind individuals sewn together with love. You can’t ask for more than love. At times there were challenges to my vision of our ‘perfect’ family. Sometimes it felt like the complete opposite of that, but it’s just about hanging in there with them. They really are fantastic kids, they just have to shake a lot of stuff off. And I can give them a chance to do that. This family is the answer to my prayers.”

‘I knew a young man who needed a family.’ For Paul Snellgrove, it was almost that simple. As a caseworker at a New York City foster care agency, Paul got to know Keith on his caseload. Keith entered foster care at 6 years old, when his mother fell prey to drug addiction. ‘I liked him,’ Paul remembers, ‘and kept an eye out for him for years, even when I wasn’t his worker.’

For Keith, the relationship with Paul was important. With a mostly absent mother and a father he did not know at all, Keith recalls ‘The first time I felt connected to anybody was with my social worker.’ Paul was consistent, and that is what mattered most to Keith. ‘Here was this skinny white guy who would come all the way up to the Bronx to see me, even when he didn’t have to…He was different from my mother who couldn’t take care of me or foster parents who didn’t want to take care of me.’

At the age of 12, Keith became available for adoption. When a permanent placement with Keith’s grandmother fell through Paul thought, ‘Why not us? I just had to convince my wife that our first kid would be a teenager.’ When Paul told Margaret the news about Keith, she was curious and agreed to attend You Gotta Believe’s parent training classes, which is where her mind first opened up to adopting a teen. ‘When I learned more, it became so clear to me… why don’t we adopt someone who’s here and already needs a home?’

When Keith moved in to his new home with Paul and Margaret, ‘I was scared and testing my parents. I didn’t want to get burnt again.’ He broke rules and did things that typically got him kicked out of other places. Then after a while he realized no one was asking him to leave when he broke rules. ‘I was finally home.’ A year later, Keith was officially adopted.

Two years on things were going so well with Keith that Paul and Margaret decided to adopt again. ‘We picked Evelyn out of a photo album. I saw that picture and I knew she was mine.’ Evelyn was 9 years old at the time and living in a foster home. When she heard that there was a couple who was interested in meeting her, ‘I jumped at the chance to say yes, but at the same time I was really scared.”

Margaret, Paul, Evelyn and her social worker went to a donut shop on that first visit where Evelyn was extremely talkative. When she walked away, the social worker leaned over and whispered, ‘I’ve never heard her talk so much!’ But while the adoption process moved swiftly, adjusting to family life as part of the Roman-Snellgrove family was challenging. ‘It took years to believe that my parents love and accept me the way they do, but now the sky is the limit. I am who I am because of my family.’

Anni’s life has radically changed from how it used to be. ‘I bonded with people through crisis. That’s all I knew.’ Anni (talk a bit about childhood)

When Anni met Mary, Mary was already parenting ** adopted teens. With a laugh she recalls, ‘I remember looking up one day and thinking… how did all these kids get in my house?’ But at Mary’s house, there was often room for one more who needed a loving family. Anni met Mary how?…and moved in when? How did that go?…

Once at Mary’s, Anni, **, continued to race from one drama to the next and had a habit of running away. One night when she did just that, Mary came looking and found Anni at her boyfriend’s house. ‘It was the first time we talked about family. I could see that she was really worried about me… she told me that she loved me and she’d adopt me.’ It was a conversation that stayed with Anni, although she remained resistant to the idea of a permanent family.

Later that year after **why did she do to end up in the ER?**, Anni ended up in the emergency room at a hospital in ***. She was ** years old, and when the intake worker asked her about her family relations and who would be taking her home that night, there was no family to list. Right then, she realized that there was no one in the world responsible for her…she felt completely alone.

That was enough to open Anni’s mind to the idea of adoption, but it didn’t mean she was comfortable with the permanent family commitment. ‘I really didn’t like most of them at first… and I’d find reasons not to like them, but they stayed around and that worked for me. I needed a family I could dislike until I liked them. And then, it took time, but that happened… and my life began at Mary’s house.’

The keynote will make the case that we must stop the practice of placing square-pegs in round-holes and recruit permanent square-peg parents for every square-peg teen due to be discharged from the foster care system completely alone. The themes noted in the workshop description below are also incorporated, and concrete ideas about recruiting permanent parents are also offered.

To see Pat O’Brien deliver this keynote at Emory University Law School click here

You Gotta Believe provides operational consulting services for agencies, staff, parents, and volunteers to learn how to find families for the young people who need them in your town. We work with each group to develop a training and technical assistance package that is tailored specifically to meet your needs. (more specifics are needed here…..)

Pat O’Brien, Founder and Executive Director of You Gotta Believe is available for speaking engagements as a key note, workshop facilitator, and expert panelist. Presentations are tailored to each audience and geographic location.

This half-day presentation will discuss how to find unconditionally committed permanent parent(s) for teens using this three prong recruitment approach: Friends, Acquaintances, & Community Education. We explain the need to find permanent homes for every teen in our care in order to prevent their homelessness upon discharge from care and dispel myths about where the homeless come from.

From there, the workshop moves to a discussion about permanency planning goals and how the inappropriate goals cause half the homelessness in our culture. We will discuss outcome studies about what happens to youth after their discharge from foster care alone and how our attitude is the only obstacle to finding permanent parents for any teen in our care. Then it’s time to get practical with how-to guidance for finding permanent parents for every teen in our care using the Finding Families Method, generalized recruitment, and community education.

Full day trainings will also incorporate an afternoon of options including:

• Recruitment Case Scenarios to address specific challenges encountered by people doing Finding Family work.
• Skills development in any area of Finding Families work: outreach to families; documentation; facilitating communication; mediating disagreements; and getting through to resistant workers.
• Parent Preparation and support.

This presentation addresses the great need for prospective and current parents to become unconditionally committed to the children that they care for, particularly teenagers, in order to prevent disruptions in permanent family homes. The emphasis here is that every child in foster care needs one placement and one placement only, and the challenges to unconditional commitment are explored and addressed.

This workshop will discuss the following issues:

• The reasons that adoptive parents unintentionally end up re-hurting, re-abandoning, re-rejecting, re-traumatizing, re-victimizing, re-abusing, and re-neglecting the children all over again by putting them out of their homes when the child engages in an unacceptable behavior.
• Skills needed to deal with children who make adults so angry that they would think about doing the unthinkable: actually hurting a child they originally came forward to help by rejecting the child and putting that child out of their household.
• How an individual’s spirituality can be an inspirational source of strength during difficult times with children that will allow the adult parent to maintain their commitment during hard times.
• What agencies can do to help assure that far less foster and adoptive parents give back their children during times of crisis and stress.
• Helping parents to find the strength from within to deal with even the most difficult of children.
• Helping people understand it is their commitment and their commitment only that is the true source of healing for any child that crosses their path.

This presentation highlights the importance of laughter for both human emotional and mental health and the importance of laughter in parenting and everyday work and family life. Laughing is one of the most natural and healthiest things one can do when confronted with the major stresses and emotional pains in life. This presentation will highlight how one can bring more laughter into both home life and work life particularly during those times when nothing seems funny.

• Will go over the myths about laughter.
• Will talk about research as it relates to laughter and parenting.
• Will offer concrete empowering ideas and suggestions about how to utilize laughter to help create bonding opportunities with children — particularly with newly placed teens and pre-teens.
• Will conduct a full group silliness exercise after speaking on the importance of silliness as a major generator of laughter.
• Will end with a presentation entitled “The 12 Step Approach to Independent Laughter” that will offer 12 great ideas about how to incorporate more laughter into one’s home life, family life, and life in general.

‘I was born in foster care,’ says Sharif, ‘then I was placed with a couple different families, before I was adopted the first time.’ ‘I did the typical teenager thing… I broke curfew and stayed out late… She told me we were going to the agency one day, and she left me there and didn’t come back.’ Without warning, Sharif returned to New York City foster care at 12-years old, where he was placed in a Residential Treatment Center. Sharif recalls he was so depressed that at some point he stopped talking altogether.

He spent more than six years in residential and group care and was planning to age out of care to no one. Only when the City had decided to close his group home did the option of a permanent family ever get raised to him and he was already over 18. For Sharif, the impending closing of the group home created instant panic. Most teens in foster care have a goal of Independent Living; but Sharif knew far too many friends who started in this direction and ended up on the street. Otherwise, there was a slim possibility for another foster placement or adoption, but after the first go around who wanted to try that again?

Representatives from Children’s Services came to talk to the young men about the facility closing. That is the first time Sharif met Susan, a senior official overseeing the transition, who would later become his mother. ‘I’ll never forget it,’ recalls Sharif. ‘She sat down with all of us and heard our stories… she couldn’t believe that no one had talked to any of us about adoption… we went around the room and you could see her getting livid. Weeks later, I was forced to go to a meet-n-greet,’ remembers Sharif. ‘Some of us got there early and Susan was there setting up. She needed ice and no one would go with her… so I did.’ The two talked about a lot on that 5-block walk. It turned out they were both avid Michigan football fans and had many other similar interests. They even had the same initials. He asked her point-blank why she wasn’t a foster parent.

After the event, Sharif’s worker asked if he was interested in being placed with a family. ‘Yeah, Susan,’ Sharif said, ‘I want her.’ The worker explained that Susan was not a foster parent and there was a list of certified foster parents they could introduce him to, but Sharif was clear about Susan. Meanwhile, Susan had been a long time advocate of older child adoption. She had also been considering parenthood but hadn’t expected it happen quite so suddenly. However, life sometimes takes amazing and unexpected turns and she very quickly decided that she wanted to become Sharif’s mom. It was only after that decision was made that they realized they even share the same birth date.

Within a short time, Susan was certified as an official placement and just three months shy of his 19th birthday, Sharif moved into his new home. Within a few months, Sharif’s best friend, Everett, was spending more and more time at their home as an escape from an unfortunate foster care placement. It became clear to Susan and Sharif that Everett belonged in the family and soon thereafter, Everett moved in. After a lifetime without a stable home, both Sharif and Everett had finally found theirs. In Sharif’s words, ‘I knew I was home right away. She gave me my own set of keys when I was still just visiting. I couldn’t believe it. I had lived in so many places and even when I was adopted before, no one ever gave me my own keys. I felt like I belonged.” That was over three years ago. Today, Susan could not be prouder of her son. Sharif is at home, attending college and pursuing his dream of performing on Broadway.

‘Making a lifetime commitment to a teen isn’t something we decided, it was something that we just did,’ reflects Chester Jackson, an adoptive father of two teens. As he puts it, ‘This whole ‘permanent homes for teens’ thing kind of found me.’ He jokes. Chester had received a call from Pat O’Brien nearly 20 years ago inviting him to come and be part of the staff of a new adoption initiative he was leading. Because Chester had been adopted himself, Pat thought he could share his personal experience with older children who were waiting for families.

Then at work, Chester met Robert who was 8 years old and had spent most of his life in foster care due to his mother’s excessive drug use (?). ‘We always had a connection,’ says Chester. ‘He was on my caseload… one of ** cases I covered.’ Robert had been in foster care for ** years, and was nearly adopted by a relative at the age of **. When that fell through, Chester thought Robert would never be the same. ‘That’s when I started thinking… how about us? My wife will tell you that it was all my idea, but she’s really the star. She welcomed Robert with open arms and didn’t look back.’

From there, the Jackson family continued to grow. Karin and Chester had a biological son, Brandon, and then Robert’s sister, Eboney, surfaced. She, too, was living in foster care, where she had been for ** years in ** placements. Eboney remembers the first thing that got her curious about the Jacksons, ‘I liked baby Brandon. That was a relationship where I felt safe and in control. I wanted to be a big sister.’ But for many years that is the only family role that felt comfortable for her.

‘I was never open to [formal] adoption until I got pregnant as a teen,’ says Eboney. Chester recalls that period as a challenging family time. As he says, ‘It wasn’t easy. It hit hard on so many levels, but Eboney was pregnant and that is what was happening… so we dealt with it.’ One might think it was a turning point for Jackson family bonding, but Eboney relays that it was actually after she moved out when she really felt that she was a part of the family.

‘I was used to leaving places and never hearing from anyone again… this time, they got us settled and called the next day.’ Then there were pictures, presents, financial help, and visits. And when times got tough as a teen mom, Eboney’s new family was there. It was just what she needed to feel like she belonged. Now, ** years later spending time with her family is Eboney’s favorite place to be with her own daughters. ‘People laugh that I vacation at my parents’ house, but spending time together is the best.’