They’re different develop-mentally from children who have parents. Children who live with non-relative caregivers have attachment issues – they aren’t ready to trust. They usually feel as if people are going to leave them. Many are placed into foster care because their families are no longer able to care or provide them with a safe and loving home. Consequently, they take it as their fault for being removed.

They have stressors that other kids don’t, including homeless-ness: “If I fail out of college, where am I going to live? If I run out of money, who’s going to take care of me?” They grow up really fast.

It’s filling a void. There’s a huge gap between the support of social services and being independent – then going to college. Nationally, approxi-mately 30 percent of foster youth go to college, and of that group, an even smaller percent graduate.

Guardian Scholars is the safety net that usually takes the place of family. We’ve designed a pro-gram based on student input – a student advisory council made up of six students who take on an advisory role for our program and provide me with support and feedback.

We offer a lot of personal enrichment activities that include mentoring, leadership training, advocacy. [Last spring], we went to Sacramento to talk to legislators about some of the laws that impact foster youth.

We are the flagship program. We were the first in the nation to begin developing a compre-hensive program that addresses this need. We have the longest history, and we also have made the most mistakes [laughs]. Therefore, my role in working with groups like the Council of Colleges – a group of nine programs in Orange County like ours – is to help them learn; show them different partner-ships that need to be developed; the different types of interac-tions you need to provide for your students; how to educate your university or community college environment. To share our history and what we’ve learned.

We’ve received a great deal of national attention. The Washing- ton Education Foundation visited last year and saw that we have great retention and graduation rates and wondered how they can make that hap-pen in the state of Washington. Representatives from several colleges in Washington came down, including Washington State, to check us out.

Casey Family Services in Balti-more and the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Washington came to look at our model. The Lumina Foundation in Indianapolis – born out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – is starting a program, as is Ball State. Nationally, I’ve shared this model at the It’s My Life Conference in Austin, Texas.