The making of My Foster Care Journey
My Foster Care Journey is a children's book created by Nina Zaremba for her Girl Scout Gold Award. The book was distributed to 50 children in West Palm Beach, Florida, along with a little plush toy, resembling Josie's toy Tucker from the book.
For my project, I wrote the book My Foster Care Journey which follows the character Josie as she enters the foster care system in West Palm Beach, Florida. She meets Tucker, a plush toy, while at the Friends of Foster Children, a foster care facility, and starts to adapt to her environment by learning more about the foster care system. I learned about the foster care system by doing nearly a year of research by meeting various actors and reading about the impacts and processes of the system, particularly in my district. I decided to write this book so that the foster care kids could have a resource that provides them some basic information about the processes and people of the foster care system, and I wrote the book in a relatively simple and fun way so that foster children could easily understand it. The foster care system can be incredibly stressful, traumatic, and confusing, so I decided to tackle this issue because I felt that I did not know about the problems of the foster care system enough and I wanted to learn more about it so that I could do something to help out the foster kids in my area.
This book explains the why and how of Josie’s situation, which is pretty general, especially by explaining who all the different actors are. For example, the case manager, the GAL (Guardian ad Litem), and the attorney are all explained and talked about in a way that does not happen often enough in real life. Therefore, the children feel more comfortable when talking to and about these actors when they realize that someone else, that someone else being Josie, has gone through the same process. This encourages the kids to be more open to talking about their emotions in reference to their situation and makes them feel a lot less lonely.