FCYU-Feature Story

Learn to Advocate
How to stand up for your rights in the system

By Sabrina Hines

Having been in five different placements during my years in foster care, I’ve witnessed a lot of young people’s rights being violated. As in any situation, if you don’t know your rights or how to stand up for them, it’s easy for someone to take advantage of you.

For example, when I was living in a group home, the staff would withhold the girls’ allowances because they felt we didn’t have any “discipline.” They would ask us to do personal favors for them. Sometimes staff would send us to the store to get them cigarettes or Chinese food. If we refused, our allowances would be withheld.

All the residents were being taken advantage of, but no one questioned the staff because we thought those were the rules. At the time it didn’t seem like such a big deal, but now I know that the staff were wrong.

You have to know your rights and stand up for them in the system. You can’t assume that someone else is going to do it for you.

What Is Advocacy?

Advocacy is a word that may sound strange, but every young person in foster care should know what it means. Advocacy is when a person or a group of people takes an action (like marching, writing a letter, or protesting) to change something they don’t like or to protect a right they already have. For example, thanks to lawyers in New York “advocating” for former foster youth who became homeless, we won the right to stay in foster care until age 21 and receive Independent Living training.

Whenever you try to advocate or stand up for your rights, you need to understand exactly what your problem is, what your rights are, what you want, and who can give you what you want. In the system this can be very hard. But it is possible to get what you need (and deserve) from the system.

I’m going to show you some of the steps you can take, using the problem in my old group home as the example. You’ll be able to use these skills to solve problems not only in foster care, but in other aspects of your life, such as school or work.

First Step: Identify the Problem

You need to decide which problem you’re facing is most important and deal with that one first. This can be your short-term goal, and you can deal with the other problems later. (In Step Three I will talk more about defining goals.)

Then you need to identify the source of the problem. In some situations it may be hard to do this, but in my group home situation it was easy: The source of the problem was the staff, because they were the ones asking us to go on errands and withholding our allowance. The group home supervisors only came to the group home during the day, while we were in school, so we didn’t have any direct contact with them.

Second Step: Educate Yourself

The next step is to learn your rights and the agency’s responsibilities. If we had known that the staff were not supposed to send residents to the store to do personal errands for them, we may have been able to do something about it. But none of us knew it was against the regulations.

How can you find out your rights? You can check your agency’s policy manual—a pamphlet that explains all the guidelines and rules of the agency. In the policy manual there should also be the number of the agency director or someone else to contact if your rights are being violated. (You can usually find this info on your agency’s website.)

If we had checked the policy manual at my old group home, we would have known that the staff were taking advantage of us. If you are having trouble getting a copy, ask your social worker, foster parent, or a trusted staff in your group home.

Third Step: Set Your Goals

Identify your goals. Try to be as realistic as possible, but don’t settle for less than what you deserve.

For example, our short-term goal would have been for the staff to stop using us for their personal errands and withholding our allowance.

Our long-term goal would have been to have a monthly meeting with the staff and the supervisor of the group home to discuss problems we were having and how we could participate in solving them. One of the problems in my old group home was that we didn’t have regular meetings where the residents and the staff could talk.

Fourth Step: Who’s in Charge?

Traditionally, youth in the system have been known to go to their social worker with their problems. It is time for youth in care to know that there are other people they can talk to in the “chain of command.”

We didn’t know that we could have talked to our group home supervisor about how the staff were treating us. We thought the staff laid down the rules and that they could not be questioned.

You need to know who’s supervising the people who are causing you the problem. Don’t be afraid to ask your social worker if there is a group home director, Independent Living program director, housing specialist, or anyone else who may be of service to you. You should also find out who’s the director of your agency—at some point you may want to tell her what the problem is.

You can also request to speak to your social worker’s supervisor, and ask if the supervisor knows someone who can help you.

Fifth Step: Who’s on Your Side?

Identify people who support you. This might include (but isn’t limited to) your foster parent, your social worker, a teacher, someone you work with, or the other group home residents. You can definitely fight for your rights by yourself, but it helps to have some encouragement and support along the way. It’s good if you can say, “My mother also thinks that it’s unfair to withhold our allowance.”

The girls in my group home should have gotten together and requested a meeting with the supervisor. A lot of times when a resident complains about the staff, the honesty of the youth is questioned. Staff often dismiss us by saying that we’re being disrespectful, which sometimes gets us in more trouble. But if the supervisor saw that a lot of girls had the same problem with the staff and were not afraid to address it, this would have gotten her attention.

Coming together as a group would have made our points strong. When you have a group of people raising concerns about a problem, it’s harder for the staff not to listen. You can call your lawyer and explain the situation to him/her.

Sixth Step: Making Your Points

At a meeting with staff and the group home supervisor, the residents should have been prepared to speak about how we were used for personal errands and to propose some solutions.

To succeed in making your points, you need to be prepared. Your social worker or staff may not be open to what you have to say, so you must keep calm. Sometimes your social worker may not know all the rights youth have. You need to be prepared to give them that information. Also, don’t forget to provide your social worker or staff with possible solutions, not just your complaints.

Remember to be assertive, not aggressive. Being assertive means asking questions and getting your points across while also being calm and respectful.

Being aggressive is demanding things and being rude. If we had told the supervisor that she better meet with us on Saturday because the staff were mistreating us, she wouldn’t have responded to our needs. But if we requested a meeting in a polite manner, telling her exactly what we wanted to meet about, we would probably have gotten a better response.

If the group home supervisor still denied us a meeting, we could have gone over her head to the group home director.

When you have a meeting with staff or a supervisor, listen carefully to what they are saying. Take notes. If they are promising you something, write it down (word for word). Try to be open to different solutions, but if you see that your solution is better, explain why.

If you don’t understand something, ask questions. If the staff or supervisor tells you that they will get back to you, ask when you should expect to hear from them. If you’re still not connecting with your social worker, then write a letter to your agency director explaining your problem, offering a possible solution, and requesting a meeting.

This story originally appeared in the March/April 1996 issue of Represent, which goes to show that the need for advocacy never changes.

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