By Connie Smith, Berkley
May is National Foster Care Awareness Month, and I know what that sounds like to most people. Another plea for more foster parents, more depressing statistics about a broken system, or grim headlines about what happens to kids who age out.
And I understand why, when the problem feels that large, we go numb. We tell ourselves it’s too big, too broken, too far outside our lane. So we scroll past it.
But I’m asking you to stop scrolling for just a moment, and pay attention.
Right now, there are nearly 329,000 children in the U.S. foster care system. Approximately 20,000 of them will age out every year, turning 18 without a permanent family, without a safety net, and without the community that every child deserves.
Of those who age out, between 40 and 50% will experience homelessness within 18 months. Only 3 to 4% will ever earn a college degree, compared to nearly half of their peers
One in four will be involved in the justice system within two years of leaving care. These are not strangers’ children. These are our children, and they will grow up, move into our neighborhoods, and shape the world our own kids and grandchildren inherit.
I say that with some authority. I am a former foster youth, who did age out of the system and beat those odds. I am also a former foster parent, a now-adoptive mother, and a foster care advocate with Guiding Harbor in Belleville, which serves children and young adults impacted by foster care.
My story entering care might seem minor compared to the tragedies others have lived, but it was still traumatic. I was born to a mother with serious mental health struggles and placed with a couple whose home turned out to be an animal-hoarding situation. When law enforcement intervened, I was moved to the home of a widowed woman near retirement age, the school lunch lady, who was raising foster children largely on her own.
What saved me wasn’t a government program. It was a village. The neighbors who always had an eye on us kids. The extra pantry that opened up when ours ran low. The person who offered a ride when my foster mom was working a double shift. Without those people showing up, quietly, consistently, without fanfare, I don’t know where I would have ended up.
The research backs this up: a 2026 Michigan State University study published in the journal Social Work Research found that youth in foster care who had adequate emotional support were significantly less likely to be incarcerated.
A wide body of research confirms that strong community networks protect foster youth against homelessness, mental health crises, and long-term instability.
I lived that truth again when my husband and I became foster parents, and then had our world turned inside out.
We had been fostering our three-year old daughter since May of 2019. Then, on March 10, 2020, exactly one week before my employer sent us home to work remotely, we welcomed her two brothers into our home: a nine-month-old, and a two-year-old.
We already had three biological children ages 17, 12, and five. Overnight, our family of six became a family of eight, in the middle of a global pandemic.
My husband and I were both news producers and editors at Fox 2 Detroit at the time. When the world hits a crisis, the newsroom does not slow down. We were producing live breaking news from home while simultaneously managing a college freshman, a high school freshman, and a kindergartner on Zoom, plus three toddlers with no daycare.
By June, I was on the phone with our social worker, sobbing, begging her to find a new home for the kids. I loved them, but I was drowning. Her response stopped me cold: “Where do you think these kids are going to go? There are no homes. They would sleep on an agency floor.”
So I pulled myself together, and I asked for help.
Neighbors dropped off casseroles from six feet away. Church friends left toys on our porch. Community members offered to mow our lawn, just to give us one less thing to worry about. None of it was dramatic. None of it required a license or a background check. It was just people showing up. And it made the difference between a family fracturing and a family holding.
Today, those three children are adopted. They are thriving. They know who they are, where they belong, and who their people are.
That is what a village does.
Here is the thing I want you to hear, though. Becoming a foster parent is not the only way to be part of this. Yes, Guiding Harbor is always looking for families willing to open their homes, and that calling is a profound and needed one. But we are not all built for the same role, and that is not a failure. It is just the truth of how communities work. We each bring something different.
What I am asking for, the smaller ask, and in many ways the more urgent one, is simply this: be part of the village.
Bring dinner to a foster family once a month. Let your teenager babysit. Coach the rec league team. Be the teacher who notices a quiet kid and offers a kind word. Sponsor a child’s activity or a family’s need through agencies like Guiding Harbor. Show up at a school fundraiser. Be the neighbor who waves from the driveway and means it.
You may not realize it, but approximately 90% of children in foster care have experienced at least one traumatic event, and 41% have a diagnosed mental health condition before they even enter the system.
These children are not broken, but they are fragile in the way that all human beings are fragile when they have been let down by the adults who were supposed to protect them. What they need, above almost anything else, is evidence that the world contains safe people. Consistent, caring, ordinary people. You.
Without the village, children who age out of foster care become untethered. Floating. Searching for something to hold onto. And whatever fills that void first will shape the rest of their lives. The statistics make clear what fills it too often: trauma, incarceration, homelessness, and cycles of poverty that reach into the next generation.
None of us wants that. Not for any child. Not even the ones we have never met.
So this May, I am asking you, one community member to another, to look around and ask yourself: What can I offer? How can I show up? Who in my neighborhood, my church, my school, my workplace might be a foster family that just needs one person to knock on the door and say, “I’ve got you”?
The village is not a metaphor. It is a choice we make, one casserole, one kind word, one show of presence at a time.
Connie Smith of Berkley is a foster care advocate supporting Guiding Harbor Foster Care Agency. She is a |former foster youth and an adoptive parent.