2008 Winner, Radio: "Wanted: Parents"

Catherine Winter was part of the American RadioWorks team that won a 2008 Casey Medal for a story about an unusual alternative for teens aging out of foster care. The story presents a painfully real portrait of the ups and downs of finding love, family and permanence.

Ellen Guettler and I began this project intending to do a story about kids aging out of foster care. We learned that, overall, these young people don’t fare very well: They are far more likely than their peers to wind up homeless, in jail or the victims of crime.

But our research turned up another intriguing fact: There is a small but growing national movement to keep teens from aging out of foster care by placing them in adoptive homes. We were fascinated. Who wants to adopt a 17-year-old? What 17-year-old is willing to take on new parents? What would that relationship look like?

We began searching for teenagers involved in the adoption process. We knew finding them would be tricky since child welfare workers are supposed to protect children’s privacy, and many people in the system don’t trust the media.

We ran into a number of brick walls before we found The Homecoming Project, a national demonstration project based in Minneapolis that has worked to place teens in permanent homes [The project is slated to end this September and will be replaced by Ampersand Families, a nonprofit resource seeking to promote permanent relationships between teens and caring adults.] Adoption workers there introduced us to a number of young people, including siblings Chris and Amanda.

Chris was 16 at the time and Amanda, 15. They lived in separate foster homes, but ate lunch together at school each day. ”We’re like this,” Amanda said, crossing her fingers to show how tight they were.

They were also hilarious. Amanda was literally a stand-up comedian -- she’d won a contest with her routine. And the two were willing to share achingly personal memories, including the details about how their mother abandoned them years before, their first horrible foster placement, and how a woman who had promised to adopt them backed out.

They gave us extraordinary access to their lives. We visited them repeatedly over nearly a year and a half. We interviewed Amanda’s foster family and recorded Amanda singing at church. We recorded meetings of the kids’ “treatment teams,” which included their social workers, foster parents, and therapists.

When a family came forward willing to adopt Chris and Amanda, we worried that we’d lose our connection with the kids. But the family agreed to share their story. They told us they wanted the world to know how desperately adoptive families for teens were needed.

Yet, nobody tried to sanitize the story. Both the adults and the kids were willing to talk about the formidable challenge of creating a new family from broken pieces. The story they helped us tell is one of real pain, and real bravery. It’s not like a children’s storybook, with the lucky orphans finding a kind family at the end.

We’ve stayed in touch with Chris and Amanda’s new family since we finished the documentary. They say they’ve found a lot of joy together, but a lot of heartbreak, too. Amanda is still with the family and is doing well. But Chris left home at 18, and he’s not in much touch with them. Still, he does have something he didn’t have before – something most kids who age out of foster care don’t have: He has people he can always fall back on.