California’s two different visions for better foster care, By Jessica Mendoza, March 9, 2016, Christian Science Monitor: “Alberto Gutierrez had been off the streets and living at a youth shelter in Los Alamitos, Calif., for about a year when, for the first time in his life, he found himself nursing a broken heart. His girlfriend of nearly two years – someone who had helped see him through the horror of being homeless – had cheated on him, he learned. ‘I felt like I had been stabbed in the chest,’ says Mr. Gutierrez, who was 15 at the time. ‘I started crying. I needed a hug.’ Thankfully, he says, Kathleen Cyr, a senior staffer at Casa Youth Shelter, where Gutierrez was then living, was happy to oblige. To a boy with few friends, a rocky relationship with his stepfather, and a mother fighting a heroin addiction, that bit of comfort meant the world, says Gutierrez, now 18…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty