S2 Ep 36 Connection in the Classroom: Building relationships with students by bringing home into classroom through student storytelling and family culture sharing.Come #ListenAndLearn #FosterCareAwarenessĮmail: to Book: Garbage Bag Suitcase: A Memoir As a community, we have an important role to play in supporting children, youth, and families. Our discussion covers her own experiences of abuse as a child, child welfare systems, adverse childhood experiences, trauma informed/implemented science, advocating for the lost children in the foster care system, and how we learn from our life journey to find those aha moments that become teach-points for others. Shenandoah, a survivor of the national foster care system, is also author of her memoir The Garbage Bag Suitcase. Garbage Bag Suitcase is not only the inspiring and hair-raising story of one woman’s journey to over- come her desolate childhood, but it also presents grass-root solutions on how to revamp the broken foster care system.In this episode I speak with Shenandoah Chefalo, national advocate for ‘the missing youth in foster care’ who have been institutionalised, trafficked, mislabeled and lost. Despite her numerous achievements in life though, she still suffers from the long-term effects of neglect, and the coping skills that she adapted in her childhood are not always productive in her adult life. She became a successful businesswoman, got married, and had a daughter.
Overcoming her many adversities, Shen became part of the 3% of all foster care children who get into college, and the 1% who graduate. The money she earned working at the local grocery store was taken by her foster parents to “cover her expenses.” When a car accident lands her in the hospital with grave injuries and no one came to visit her during her three-week stay, she realizes she is truly all alone in the world. With foster parents more interested in the income received by housing a foster child, Shen was once again neglected emotionally. Surely she would fare better at a stable home than living with her mother? It turns out that it was not the storybook ending she had hoped for.
After being abandoned by her mother for months at her grandmother’s retirement community, she asked to be put into foster care. Finally at the age of 13, Shen had had enough. She endured numerous moves in the middle of the night with just minutes to pack, multiple changes in schools, hunger, cruelty, and loneliness. Garbage Bag Suitcase is the true story of Shenandoah Chefalo’s wholly dysfunctional journey through a childhood with neglectful, drug-and alcohol addicted parents.
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