Above and Beyond

Joan Cooper is passionate about kids...especially foster kids. She’s also very interested in helping foster parents obtain the tools they need to be great parents. It’s that goal that has motivated her to take the lead in Child Saving Institute's foster parent networking support group AND become CSI’s first non-staff foster parent “trainer”—leading the required 10-week licensing class. Most surprisingly, she expends this time and energy despite the fact she is no longer a foster parent.

Now that’s going “all in” for kids.

Joan and Justin Cooper knew from the beginning they would be foster parents some day. Justin, an attorney for Omaha’s Metropolitan Utility District, was a former public defender and had seen first-hand the struggles of children in the system. Joan, a life-long teacher, was committed to changing outcomes for at-risk kids. It was a natural fit. When their daughter, Lauren, was 11, they completed licensing to become foster parents. They assumed they were going to get school age children, but welcomed two (unrelated) infant girls instead. “We decided from the beginning that whatever happens in reunification, no matter how long or short their stay, we would give the foster children placed in our care something that no one would ever take away from them,” Joan recalls. “They would know they were valued in our home.

The Coopers

“No matter the timeframe, foster parenting allows you an incredible opportunity to give them a ‘regular’ day, a ‘regular’ life for a while. Think of that opportunity!”

Joan is also attuned to the intense grief foster children experience. “When it comes to fostering, many parents focus on the grief they will feel when the child leaves their home to reunify, but we must acknowledge the grief the child is experiencing. We mourn the child, but in their separation, they are experiencing grief for many people—sisters and brothers, grandparents, aunts and uncles—everything familiar.”

As chance would have it, the Coopers adopted the little girls, Marissa and Vanessa, now six years old, essentially “maxing out” their home for extended foster placement. Undaunted in their commitment to serve children in need, Joan and Justin retained their license so they are able to offer respite care for foster parents needing a break, and Joan continues to lead the networking group. With her new system of planning monthly topics for the entire year to address specific issues, parents are able to attend those sessions they feel will be of the most help. As a result, she is seeing more repeat attendance as well as new faces. It’s an effort that not only results in better parenting, but happier, more knowledgeable foster parents which, in turn, benefits the kids.

“There are ways to continue to give back even if you can’t have children in your home,” Joan concludes. “I believe there is a way for a family to play some part in serving these troubled families to prevent them from staying broken. If you can be a foster family, great, but if you can’t, you can serve kids in other ways—donate clothing, offer respite care, offer encouragement and support. There are lots of areas where people can get involved.”

Couponing for Kids

In the spring of last year, Susan Nabity sat on her sofa, feeling anxious and desperate—one of the clients in her small house cleaning business had just passed away and it was a huge blow to her monthly income.

Not only did she have bills to pay, but she was feeling the pressure of being a single mother to a teenage son—a very big teenage son who at 6'5" and 300 pounds required lot of food to fuel his athletic pursuits at Fremont High School.

"I really didn't know what I was going to do," Nabity explains. The television had been on in the background, but suddenly Nabity became aware of the program—"Extreme Couponing." She watched with growing interest as the show featured enthusiastic shoppers planning and clipping their way to unbelievable savings. "I thought to myself, this is either really fake or I can do this!" 

"I can't begin to know what these kids have experienced or what they’re going through now, but just knowing my hobby can help them is overwhelming. I'm just so glad I can do it."

With an inkling of hope, Nabity began clipping coupons and watching sales while continuing to watch the show for further pointers. She asked her friends and customers to save their coupon circulars for her as well, and she started seeing the results of her efforts. In fact, on one particularly successful shopping trip at Walmart, her coupons garnered her $300 worth of product as well as $78 in cash!

So what do you do with so much stuff? Well if you’re Susan Nabity, you help others in need. "God blessed me and saved me at a rough time in my life," she notes. "So I thought I should turn around and give to others." A former paraeducator who had facilitated after-school educational programs for public schools and a non-profit, Nabity had a particular fondness for kids in need. Acting on the suggestion of one of her customers, she approached Child Saving Institute with her "bounty."

Over the past several months, Nabity has dropped off donations of toothpaste (hundreds of tubes!), toothbrushes, floss, diapers and diaper cream, baby shampoo, bath wash and lotion, deodorant, hair products, razors, body lotion and gum. In turn, these items have been distributed to clients in CSI's programs, including the emergency shelter, Young Parents Program and, most recently, to Child Saving Institute’s Foster Families.

"I can't begin to know what these kids have experienced or what they’re going through now," Nabity says quietly, "but just knowing my hobby can help them is overwhelming. I'm just so glad I can do it."

Susan's donations also help stock our Baby Boutique, where young parents can "shop" for items for their babies with points they earn through making good life choices such as earning a GED or taking their baby to doctor's appointments.

Loving Support

Thanks to you and others like you, Jade is well on her way to making a good life for herself and her toddler son, Say'Vonn. It is more than she could have hoped for in the dark months following her expulsion from school a few years ago at age 14.

Jade got in an argument with a girl at school. When the girl punched her, Jade hit her back. The following day, she was expelled. She fell into a deep depression, and with no advocacy at home, she became lost. Eventually Jade entered an alternative school, but instead of being allowed to learn, she struggled to survive the near-daily duress of physical threats, brutality and sexual harassment by the other students. Jade dropped out of school and became gang-affiliated, experimenting with drugs and alcohol. 

Jade and her son, Say'Vonn

When she learned she was pregnant at 16, she took a hard look at her life and the dreary outlook for her unborn child if she continued on the same path. "Here I was going to be a single mom and I still had no education, no direction…I knew things had to change," Jade recalls. She learned of Child Saving Institute’s 10-week parenting class through the Young Parents Program and there she found hope and help with social worker Tricia Wagner. "Tricia is the best support I’ve ever had," Jade says enthusiastically. "She has helped me in so many ways. She tells me I’m a wonderful mom, and I can get my education. She helped me get started in Independent Studies…She’s been there every step of the way."

"I was going to be a single mom
and I had no education, no direction…
I knew things had to change."

Now Jade attends an intensive, accelerated program where she earns credits toward her high school diploma over the course of weeks, rather than semesters. She and Say'Vonn had been living in a shelter sponsored by the Salvation Army, but she recently returned home to live with her mother.

"Jade inspires me," Wagner says. “She is working so hard—studying and taking good care of her baby. She even wants to go to college and dreams of being an obstetrician some day. That girl is a dynamo and I know she can accomplish anything she sets her mind to."
  
"I changed everything to be a better parent to my son," Jade says quietly. "He's my light at the end of the tunnel. In addition to being an OB-GYN, I'd also like to talk to young people about making good choices. I’d like to teach them how to be strong like Tricia has helped teach me. You can change your life around. There is hope."

Memory Lane

In the late fall of 1950, Margie Straw, 24, and her good friend June Blevins, 19, went to the movies in Nebraska City where they were deeply moved by a story of suffering children. That random experience changed Margie’s life forever.

A 120th Moment  ::  Memory Lane

“June and I went to the picture show and it was about an orphanage where the children were mistreated so badly,” Margie, now 86, explains. “I decided right then and there that I wanted to work for an orphanage and straighten them out. Well June had the same idea, so we were off.”

Margie and June did some research and sent out employment applications to agencies in the area. One agency responded noting openings for a position in which they would care for 8-year-olds and do housework. Child Saving Institute responded that there were immediate openings for them to serve as nurses’ aides to the little children—and no housework. The young women opted for CSI.

They moved together to the “big city” in 1951, living in a dormitory in the Child Saving Institute orphanage located at 42^nd and Emilie Street. Margie recalls that as a condition of their employment, they were asked “to sign papers that we would never enter a bar within 10 miles of the orphanage and we couldn’t use bad language.” They signed on the dotted line and their adventure began. 
   

Margie holding Peggy

All of the six nurses’ aides and two registered nurses who tended the approximately 30 babies in the nursery provided gentle, compassionate care, but each woman also had their personal favorites or “pets,” as Margie called them. From the moment Mrs. Beals, the orphanage superintendent, took Margie on a tour through the home, she became enamored of a baby with brown curly hair and big eyes named Dale. “We just fell in love with each other from the beginning,” Margie explains. She also fell for a beautiful biracial baby named Peggy. “I got attached to Peggy and she got attached to me,” Margie recalls. “I was ‘MomMom’ to her. One day when Peggy got demanding and I wasn’t there, the head nurse even said to her, ‘Peggy, your mom will be with you in a minute!’”

Margie talked about Peggy so much when she’d go home to visit her family, her mother made Peggy a new dress from feed sack fabric, which was a common practice in the day. The pleated dress featured a bright tulip pattern, and the orphanage laundress took special care to press the pleats so Peggy looked particularly darling on “visiting day,” when prospective adoptive families visited the orphanage. Later, Peggy’s adoptive family mailed the pretty dress back with a note expressing their joy in their beautiful daughter, whom they had renamed “Merry” because of her cheery disposition.

Margie today, at her home in Nebraska City

Sitting in her cozy kitchen surrounded by her collection of tea pots, Margie overflows with stories from her nearly four years at CSI, her eyes twinkling and her laughter bright as she recalls memories from nearly six decades ago. She especially enjoyed the special Christmas celebrations involving lots of toys and decorated Christmas trees in every room. On Christmas Eve the Shriners—accompanied by an Omaha World-Herald photographer—would arrive to entertain the kids, and all of the children and babies would be dressed in flannel pajamas and posed on the stairs for a photo which appeared on the front page of the paper on Christmas day.

Then there were her tales of the children. She shares story after story about the little ones she fed and bathed and loved during her time at CSI. Darling baby Roger with the bright red leather shoes, mischievous preschooler Keith who unlatched a closet screen door and “repainted” a freshly painted room, and tiny, malnourished Douglas. It wasn’t unusual in those days for working mothers to pay a small stipend to place their children at CSI to ensure quality care. Douglas’s mother brought him to Child Saving Institute after learning his daycare provider wasn’t feeding the baby and he suffered severe malnutrition resulting in developmental delays. At 10 months old, Douglas could not sit up, but Margie diligently worked with him until he was sitting on his own, and proudly displayed his progress to his overjoyed mother when she came on visiting day. “Eventually Douglas crawled and walked…He was a real firecracker!” she observes with a chuckle.

All too soon, Margie was called home to help her mother care for her ailing father, but her memories stayed strong as she worked at a variety of other jobs through the years, including long-held positions in the garment and food industries as well as participating in a family-owned grocery store and sanitation business.

“If there was one thing I learned at Child Saving, it was that loving does a lot for children,” Margie says thoughtfully. “Loving is the key to them being good; or if there is no love—then being bad or sick. It’s the loving that makes the real difference.”                                 


                                 

Black Homes for Black Children

Throughout its long history, CSI has always been at the forefront in ground-breaking programming for at-risk children. One of the most successful—and most controversial—was the innovative and effective Black Homes for Black Children program.


A 120th Moment  ::  Black Homes for Black Children

 
By the late 1970s, the number of infants available for adoption had declined dramatically, but there remained a critical need to find homes for African American children of all ages. Child Saving Institute was at the forefront in addressing this need by offering “Project Placement” a special needs/black adoption program. Then, in 1982 CSI received funding through the National Benevolent Association and matched by the CSI Board of Directors to form a program called Black Adoption Unlimited. Shortly thereafter, CSI received a federal grant administered through the Nebraska Department of Social Services, which allowed the agency to implement the ground-breaking program Black Homes for Black Children. The BHBC program, started in October of 1984, concentrated on intensively identifying, recruiting and preparing black and interracial families for adoptive placement of black and bi-racial children and youth.

Donna Tubach-Davis, who started out at CSI as a social worker and eventually led the organization as CEO for more than 25 years, remembers having a passion for the plight of African American children in the system as early as the mid-1960s. She brought this passion with her when she joined the staff of CSI in 1971 and began actively working toward more permanent placement for black children, even before there were any formal programs in place. “It’s not that we were against trans-racial homes for black children, as some opponents thought, but that we wanted to find more potential homes. There were so many more children in need of homes than there were homes available,” Tubach-Davis explains. “And the truth was, African Americans were adopting more frequently than Caucasians, but the process was more informal within their communities.”

Tubach-Davis said CSI began an intensive outreach program into these communities, starting with caseworkers becoming actively involved in African American churches and organizations in Omaha. Word of the program spread, and soon its success was being touted nationally as well as locally.

In its early days, the program was publicized primarily through staff presentations to churches, community service organizations and professional groups with close ties to the community, as well as a series of public service announcements using Susan Taylor, then Editor in Chief of Essence Magazine, billboards, direct mail, flyers and newspaper announcements. When Nebraska DSS cut funding to the Black Homes program in 1986, the program’s advocates—the Black Homes Advisory Board, CSI’s Board of Directors, the staff and enthusiastic adoptive parents—mobilized and succeeded in getting one-third of the funding reinstated. Additional financial support was provided by the National Benevolent Association and the Black Caucus of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and a grant awarded by the Kiewit Foundation in 1988. To keep the program going, CSI also launched a series of large-scale fundraising events. Among the offerings: speaking events featuring world-famous African American leaders such as Dr. Alvin Poussaint, Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu and Father George Clements; annual Gospel Jubilees; and celebrity auctions, featuring donated items from Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Whoopi Goldberg and many others.

The Blacks Homes for Black Children program formally ended in 1992 due to lack of funding and adoption changes implemented through the *Multiethnic Placement Act (MEPA), but the ideals of the program—to find more families for children in need of forever homes—lived on in other programming offered through CSI. In the end, BHBC recruited more than 300 black adoptive families and placed more than 100 black and biracial children in forever homes.

*Multiethnic Placement Act (MEPA)
Since 1972, when the National Association of Black Social Workers first issued a public statement opposing Transracial Adoption, controversy has raged about placing children with families across ethnic and racial lines. Concerned about the impact of this policy on children waiting for families and for its broader message about racism in our society, organizations such as the National Committee to End Racism and the National Council for Adoption moved to action. They published studies, advocated with the courts and state legislatures, and testified before Congress, urging that federal law be changed to ban discrimination in adoption.

One U.S. senator took on this cause as his own personal mission, vowing to see the law changed before he left office. And, true to his word, Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) succeeded in attaching his bill, the Metzenbaum Multiethnic Placement Act, to another law moving through the Senate. His bill essentially required that those receiving federal funds could not delay or deny the placement of a child in adoption or foster care because of considerations of race or ethnicity.

A "120th" Moment

Stories from our past aren't much different than stories from our present. This story was told in our Annual Report from 1908. . .

October 31, 1908  ::  Blind Baby's Sight Restored

A few months ago a poor woman, poorly clad, came to the Institute with the most pitiable object ever brought. The baby had very little clothing, which was of the poorest sort and was in a frightful condition, needing a bath and suffering from hunger, with its eyes inflamed and swollen shut.  

The mother explained that she know the baby’s eyes were sore and in a bad condition; but that since her husband abandoned her, she was unable to provide food for the baby for several days, and she had no comfortable place in which to sleep. . .

She explained that her husband had abandoned her three weeks previous to that time, and she thought he had gone to Mexico. She wanted to sign papers of relinquishment and start to Mexico in search of her husband. The Superintendent inquired about the condition of the baby’s eyes and insisted that she should go with a nurse to one of the oculists on the medical staff. When the physician saw the child, he expressed the opinion that it was too late to save the sight. The mother explained that she know the baby’s eyes were sore and in a bad condition; but that since her husband abandoned her, she was unable to provide food for the baby for several days, and she had no comfortable place in which to sleep.  

The baby cried most of the time. The mother had no money to pay to a doctor. The physician gave directions for treatment.The first twenty-four hours required the change of applications every twenty minutes, for the second twenty-four hours applications were changed every thirty minutes, all night, as well as during the day, by the nurses. At the end of forty-eight hours the physicians expressed hope that the baby would have at least partial sight restored and at the end of one week expressed the belief that the baby would be cured. The persistent treatment which followed resulted in a complete cure and thus the baby’s eyesight was restored and prevented thereby from going through life in total blindness and being a burden to the community.  

The physicians gave the judgment that twenty-four hours longer of neglect and the child would have been totally blind.

-From the Eleventh Annual Report of the Child Saving Institute