Former Foster Kids Hope to Improve System DEARBORN, MICH. (Michigan Radio) - Rebecca Gremore is a stay-at-home mom trying to give her young son and daughter the kind of childhood she never had.

Gremore spent her childhood in foster care. And now that she's an adult, she's working to improve the system.

A few years ago, she helped start a foster care youth board in her home county. There are about a dozen of the boards around the state.

Gremore says there's one thing foster kids want more than anything else.

"It's no decisions about us without us," she says. "All of us youth got together, and we said this is number one right here. Don't make any choices about us without us. If you can't do what we think, we feel might be the best decision, then please explain why."

Gremore says too many people think of foster kids as troublemakers and delinquents. She says she sees it as part of her life's work to smash that stereotype, and to get the people who make decisions about foster kids to listen to what they have to say.

Gremore and her youth group have stood outside Wal-Mart to introduce themselves to the community, and arranged meetings with school administrators. This spring, she'll take a group of foster kids to meet with judges and lawyers in Livingston County to talk about the court system that's responsible for kids in foster care.

"One of the biggest complaints right now with youth is that a lot of youth - well, most of the youth - only see their lawyers like five minutes before a court hearing, or maybe a ten minute phone call," Gremore says. "And when a lawyer is supposed to represent your best wishes, how can they do that when they don't know you?"

But some foster care alumni want more than an advisory role in the child welfare system. They say real improvements in the lives of foster kids will only happen when they're helping to run that system.

"Unless we have people who are in leadership positions, that have access to resources, access to power, access to influence, an advisory board is like not having a board at all," says John Seita, a social work professor at Michigan State University who spent his childhood in foster care.

Seita says you wouldn't see the NAACP led by a white person. Or the National Organization for Women led by a man. So he says it's not OK that none of Michigan's child welfare agencies are led by former foster care kids. That was the finding of a survey Seita conducted of Michigan's private child welfare agencies a few years ago.

Misty Stenslie is on the board of the national advocacy group Foster Care Alumni of America. She agrees there need to be more former foster kids leading the organizations that take care of them. But she says getting there will take some time and patience.

"When you're first working to incorporate a new perspective, there is just a developmental process starts somewhere. And where it typically starts is with some tokenism," says Stenslie.

Becky Gremore says she feels like she's an important part of the state's effort to improve foster care.

Since she left the system, the state started a policy called Team Decision Making. It lets foster kids sit in when something major is being decided. That could be when they're about to be taken away from their family, or removed from a foster home, or reunited with their birth parents.

It also allows grandparents, teachers, counselors, and people like her to take part in those meetings. She says seeing the system from the inside has given her a new perspective.

"I'm now in turn trying to advocate for my caseworker," says Gremore. "So I try to advocate for improving the jobs of our caseworkers and improving the system on a much higher level it will help trickle down and improve the smaller levels. And that will hopefully improve the lives of the children."

This past week, a group of former foster care kids met with state lawmakers to go over the recommendations made by Michigan's foster care youth boards.

They include better efforts by the state to keep families together, and more help getting driver's licenses and financial aid.

But most of all, they say they want decisions about their lives to include them.

Contact Sarah Hulett at sarahhu@umich.edu © Copyright 2012, Michigan Radio