This story was originally published by The Imprint, a national nonprofit news outlet covering child welfare and youth justice. Sign up for The Imprint’s free newsletters here.
When Deddtrease Edwards ran away from foster care for the last time at age 17, she packed her few belongings the way she always had: in trash bags. By then, it felt normal.
The north Minneapolis teen, now 28, had already spent three years piling clothes, photos and crafts she made in group homes into plastic sacks. At times the bags would rip, leaving everything she owned scattered on the ground.
“You just feel disposable and like nobody cares about you,” said Edwards, a contributor to The Imprint’s Youth Voices Rising program.
Final votes could be cast this week that would protect other foster youth from this experience.
A bill to outlaw the practice pushed by multidenominational faith groups failed to progress this session. But the pending Minnesota Foster Youth Bill of Rights details a list of legal protections for young people in government care that includes the right to “appropriate travel bags.”
Rep. Jess Hanson, who represents parts of Savage and Burnsville, introduced both legislative proposals. In a phone interview last month, she said wouldn’t send her children to summer camp with their stuff packed in garbage bags. So, she asked, why should foster children have to move between homes like that?
“I hate that I have to pass legislation to make sure that fosters are treated with the dignity and worth that they inherently have as children,” Hanson said in an interview.
If the Foster Youth Bill of Rights becomes law, Minnesota would join several other states — including New York, Oregon, Oklahoma and Maryland — that have recently passed legislation addressing the problem.
Former south-central Minnesota foster youth Shane Read, 29, highlighted the indignity of being removed from home and then shuffled around with disposable bags.
Read, who has also written opinion pieces for Youth Voices Rising, entered foster care at age 11. Living between temporary homes and facilities, he moved with garbage bags twice.
“It was a 16-gallon,” he said. “And so I’m putting my four outfits and my one stuffed animal and the little bit of money that I had inside of it.”
The state’s Ombudsperson for Foster Youth Misty Coonce is pushing for the bill of rights to counter these far-too-common occurrences. The legislation — which could see a final floor vote this week — includes language to protect young people’s privacy and their rights to give input on healthcare decisions and participate in religious and cultural practices.
At a legislative hearing in March, Coonce said the bill’s standards will ensure that kids are treated consistently by foster parents and social workers. “It’s not a fix for every problem in our system,” she said. “But it is a huge step forward and sends a message that we expect better for our foster youth.”
Leah Patton is a lobbyist heading the Joint Religious Legislative Committee, a group representing Catholic, Protestant and Jewish interests that brought the issue to Hanson’s office. Other legislative pushes focus on improving food security and affordable housing, gun violence prevention and efforts to limit online gambling.
Patton said her group’s focus on the need for luggage in foster care was inspired by a similar New York law that passed earlier this year. The bill would have clarified existing law in order to allow counties to accept donated luggage as long as it’s new or in good condition. It would also have required counties to submit annual reports to the Office of the Foster Youth Ombudsperson about compliance.
But the lobbying began too late in the legislative session for the bill to proceed this year, Patton said. In the meantime, she is reaching out to other lawmakers to gather support for next year.
“It’s upsetting that vulnerable kids are having to deal with that. It just seems like such a basic thing that should be intuitive, shouldn’t even be a question,” Patton said. “And it’s something that’s retraumatizing these kids — kids that already experience shame and embarrassment at being in foster care.”
Absent any current legal requirements in Minnesota, some local governments have come to rely on charities. Anita Olson, a foster parent who lives roughly an hour north of Minneapolis, runs a community closet that supplies luggage and other necessities to children in her state and neighboring Wisconsin.
Olson learned of such needs when she began taking in foster youth in 2013, and realized kids often arrived with nothing but what they were wearing. And the costs of basic necessities added up.
So in 2017 she founded Safe Haven Foster Shoppe, which provides clothes, toiletries and toys, packed neatly in backpacks and duffle bags. She’s also helped social workers who’ve asked for luggage for foster youth moving between placements.
“It definitely has a long-lasting impact,” Olson said. “The earlier the intervention of removing that garbage bag and replacing it with something that makes them feel more valued and has substantial thought behind it is going to alleviate more trauma.”
Nashauna Johnson-Lenoir, who entered foster care in Chicago in the 1990s at age 4, said she moved between more than a dozen foster and group homes with garbage bags. Sometimes when she arrived at a new home, her foster parents made her empty out her bags on the porch and said she was only allowed to keep some things. Or they made her throw it all out.
Johnson-Lenoir now runs Journie, a Rochester, Minnesota-based nonprofit that prepares foster youth for adulthood and teaches them leadership skills. But the experience of moving with a garbage bag has stuck with her. When a foster parent finally gave her a suitcase with wheels, along with a carry-on and a duffle bag, she cried.
“I took a brown permanent marker, and I wrote my name on it,” she said. “I was excited because it was mine.”
