From foster care to a new set of problems. This Fort Worth group helped her beat the odds
Angelica Brothers checked out of the Texas foster care system on her 18th birthday.
She’d been caught sneaking out a few days before and as a consequence she was kept from the other kids in the group home. Now that she was a legal adult, she wanted out permanently. So on the morning of May 23, 2020, Brothers took the step that would make her responsible for her own life.
“At 7 in the morning I signed the paper and I left,” Brothers said. “That was a crazy day.”
When Brothers walked out the door of the group home, she walked into a whole new set of problems.
For starters, she was homeless.
A former foster sister let Brothers stay at her house for a short time and then she moved in with a boyfriend. At that time in her life she had no plans to attend college and no plans for her future.
Renika Atkins, founder of a Fort Worth-based nonprofit that serves foster youth, said Brothers’ story is a common one. The state of Texas allows foster youth to strike out on their own at 18. They have the option of signing a Voluntary Extended Foster Care agreement and staying in the system until the age of 21, but others, like Brothers, just want to get out all together even though they may not be ready to live on their own.
“If they want the resources that foster care provides, they have to stay attached to foster care,” Atkins said. “Meaning that they’ll still have a caseworker that they have to be in contact with every month and things of that sort. A lot of them don’t want to do that, so a lot of them do like run away or check themselves out of foster care at the age of 17 or 18.”
According to the National Foster Youth Institute, 25% of former foster youth are homeless four years after leaving the system and only 3% go on to get a college degree.
Atkins is out to help young people like Brothers beat the odds. In 2015 she began Resources Empowering Success and Inspiring, known as RISE, to raise awareness about struggles foster youth face and provide resources to help them bridge the gap between foster care and successful adulthood.
STEM Camp
One of those resources RISE provides is a summer STEM camp for girls 10 to 17. According to Atkins, the {HER} Code Summer STEM Experience is the only STEM camp for girls in foster care.
“It teaches you problem solving skills, decision making skills, and it also just kind of teaches you to have a different way of thinking about things,” Atkins said. “So even if they do not go into STEM, I believe it very much makes them a lot more employable, a lot more open to the possibilities that are presented to them in their life.”
Atkins said about 90 girls have gone through the two-week day camp, which began in 2019.
The theme is different every year. For the first camp, women from Lockheed Martin came to build rockets with the girls and talk about careers in engineering. At this year’s camp the girls studied cybersecurity and visited TCU to learn about the university’s STEM Scholars Program.
A recent $3,500 grant from the Society for Science will allow Atkins to bring more staff onboard for the 2023 camp and expand the field experience.
Allie Stifel, the Society for Science STEM Action Grant program director, said it is rare to see groups who offer STEM training for those in foster care.
“We’re just looking for people who are being creative in how they’re out doing outreach in the STEM field to audiences that really need it,” Stifel said.
Going up
The STEM camp was also what brought Brothers into contact with Atkins several months before she left the foster system.
To Brothers, it was just another summer camp that her foster mother enrolled her for. She wasn’t interested in STEM and she was going through a tough transition to another foster home at the time.
She remembers building a rocket and a few of the other projects, but mostly she remembers how Atkins reached out to her.
“I was so stressed out about what was going to happen because I didn’t know where I was going to go, and she really like ... got to my heart,” Brothers said.
Atkins stayed in touch with Brothers even after she left the foster system. She pushed her to go to college and helped her through the application process.
Today Brothers is in her freshman year at the University of North Texas, majoring in business and merchandising and planning to pursue a career in interior decorating.
She said she wouldn’t be in college without Atkins’ influence.
“I don’t think I’m ever going to stop talking to her,” Brothers said of Atkins. “I’m always going to want to tell her how good I’m doing because I’m just gonna keep going up from here.”
