Those Who Spent Time As Youths in Foster Care Say Helping Others Is a
Calling
System Fosters Future Social Workers
“Don’t do what you think you want to do. Do what you are meant to do.”
By Matthew Malamud, News Staff
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| Credit: John Michael Yanson |
Two hours north of San Francisco, in California’s wine
country, is the small town of Ukiah, where Jetaine Hart grew up. It’s about the
farthest from the nation’s capital one can go heading due west before reaching
the Pacific Ocean.
It’s a far cry from Capitol Hill, where Hart lives and works
these days.
Traversing the country, wending from a small town to the big
city, isn’t the only long journey Hart has made in her life; she’s come a
considerable way from a childhood spent first in poverty and then in foster
care. Hart, now a social worker, currently works for Louisiana Democratic Sen.
Mary Landrieu.
“We were very poor,” Hart recalled in an interview with NASW
News. “My mom was on welfare and there were times when she couldn’t feed us.”
Her mother, who was single, often abused Hart and her brother, though Hart
insists that her mother wasn’t inherently bad. “She just didn’t know how to be
a parent.”
When Hart was 9 years old, her mother attempted suicide and
subsequently spent some time in a psychiatric facility. That’s when a social
worker placed Hart and her brother with a host family.
She would spend the next nine years of her life going between
foster homes, reuniting with her mother for a year before ultimately going back
to foster care. Uncertainty and constantly having to acclimate to new
environments became a way of life.
Recounting her initial experience in foster care, Hart said:
“I remember the first night we ate dinner, the family ate fried chicken with a
fork and knife.” Thinking it was peculiar but eager to assimilate, she and her
brother began eating fried chicken with a fork and knife.
“The next family we lived with we were laughed at for eating
with a fork and knife,” she said. “Each place we went had different rules.”
At an early age, Hart determined she would overcome her
circumstances and not live in poverty. She did not want, as she said, to become
a teenage mother on welfare, which she feared was her destiny as the product of
an impoverished and broken home.
She credits having good mentors, one of whom was a social
worker, for showing her the way. “I had some really bad experiences with social
workers,” Hart noted. “But then, I had a great social worker that I’m still in
touch with to this day. She became my independent living social worker when I
was 16. She made sure I did what I needed to do.”
Hart credits that social worker with inspiring her to pursue a
career in social work.
“I knew that I wanted to help people,” said Hart, noting that
she contemplated studying law before deciding social work was the ideal career
for her once she aged out of foster care. “I could help kids, give back to my
community — that really motivated me.”
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From November 2010 NASW News. © 2010 National
Association of Social Workers. All Rights Reserved. NASW News
articles may be copied for personal use, but proper notice of
copyright and credit to the NASW News must appear on all copies
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