Urgent Memo

URGENT MEMORANDUM
JUNE 11, 2014

TO:         CALIFORNIA’S SENATORS AND ASSEMBLY MEMBERS
FROM:   ONE OF YOUR 60,000 FOSTER CHILDREN
RE:         PLEASE!

Imagine if one of your legislative staffers was assigned to work on more than 300 bills … in one year. Imagine over 300 bill binders in your staffer’s office. Impossible, right?

My lawyer – the only adult in my life who is has the legal duty to make sure the laws you pass actually benefit me, the one adult in my life with a duty just to me – she has a case load of over 300 children like me, more than twice what the Judicial Council says is the maximum possible case load.

This is what such a case load looks like. My whole life and future is somewhere in these files.

Senators, Assembly members, you by force of law have separated me from my parents. I am now being raised within a bureaucracy. I am being solicited by pimps; about half of sexually trafficked girls are right now in foster care with me. There is a good chance I will be homeless when I age out. I am far more likely to end up in prison than other youth. Odds are, I will not graduate from a four-year college.

Respectfully, last night you found money for many things but you decided to take away my voice, my champion. You took away my hope.

Please, I beg of you. Please reconsider. I am your child.

____________

If you would like to do something to help ensure California’s Foster Children have access to the effective representation they need, CONTACT GOVERNOR BROWN’s OFFICE and tell him that foster youth need adequate attorney representation. Dependency attorney caseloads must be reduced.