Protecting Foster Care Children: The Power Of The Powerless Trafficked, raped and alone, one former foster youth stands for thousands.
The story of 19-year-old Suahmirs Rivera is one of extended powerlessness turned diamond-hard inner strength. A strength he is now using to defend 1,400 former foster youth who like himself fear being cast into the street because of one of Governor Schwarzenegger's proposed budget cuts.
When the then 16-year-old Rivera was thrown in a truck and stabbed with an IV in his native Honduras, he was powerless. When the drugs wore off and he realized he had been trafficked to a flophouse in San Diego, he too was powerless.
Opinion: No excuse for California to fail foster children now
Because of the rewriting of a single sentence of
federal foster care policy, California is suddenly left
with few excuses not to radically improve the lives of the 80,000 children in the state's foster care
system and set a progressive tone for the 500,000
others across the nation.
This shift in federal policy will free up $60 million
annually for California foster children — if the
governor's budget office doesn't funnel the funds
into corrections or costly civil servant contracts.
For a man sitting on a rocket ship, 30-year-old neuroscientist Dr. Philip Low maintains a steady hand. In it, as he sits in his ethereal La Jolla, CA offices of his startup NeuroVigil, Low holds his miniature iBrain device. The size of two pennies, the miniature iBrain marks what scientists, doctors and venture capitalists see as holding the potential to revolutionize the study of sleep, speed the diagnosis of disease and tap into the multibillion dollar sleep and neurodiagnostics markets. "We are about to give people access to their own brain," Low says with cool confidence.
Weekly's Heimpel wins Anna Quindlen award for gripping story on growing up in foster care
Daniel Heimpel, freelance writer for the Weekly, has won the national Anna Quindlen Award for Excellence in Journalism in Behalf of Children and Families, a national competition founded 15 years ago to recognize print reporters, editorial writers, and broadcasters whose coverage of child welfare "advances knowledge and understanding of the state of vulnerable children and families in America."
Heimpel, a volunteer foster care mentor in his private life, won in the hotly contested print category for his 2009 Weekly cover story, "Left to Themselves: Nobody can undo the damage to kids like John Kyzer, raised from infancy by the foster care industry."
