Advance Praise

Beyond the Foster Care System: The Future for Teens is a powerful tool to help youths in foster care move to fully engaged lives in our society. We do a great injustice to children and youths when we underestimate their potential and demand less of them because of a label society attaches to them. Through the stories of wonderful young people, we learn how to build on their strengths, abilities, and ambition to help them succeed. -Marian Wright Edelman, President and Founder, Children's Defense Fund

Here is an extraordinary effort to connect with young, vulnerable people, enable their lives, their hopes and worries, to become known by the rest of us. Here, too, is lively, knowing, socially alert scholarship become a reader's blessing-a way for us to understand what our country's youth need, want, desperately ought have: the interested, compassionate attention of their fellow citizens. -Robert Coles, Pulitzer-prize winning author

There is a Dickensian system of foster care in America. Because it is not fiction, there are not many happy endings. Betsy Krebs and Paul Pitcoff recognized one terrible aspect of the problem: the children were unable to advocate for themselves and there was no Charles Dickens to write them out of the cage of the foster care system and into decent productive lives as adults. And then Krebs and Pitcoff, two lawyers, went to work. They called their work the Youth Advocacy Center. And after they had years of experience, when they knew it worked, they wrote this book. Every reader will be touched by this book; no one can turn away from the power of the real people who live in it. And while there is not yet a happy ending to the tragic aspects of the foster care system, the good news Krebs and Pitcoff deliver, in their clear, wonderfully readable book, is that there is hope. -Earl Shorris, author, Riches for the Poor, founder of the Clemente Course in the Humanities

The odds are stacked against all children in this nation's foster care system, but teenagers are quite possibly the most disserved of all. At precisely the time when they should be treated seriously, with a presumption of young adulthood, the foster care system fails to prepare young people for independence and future success. Betsy Krebs and Paul Pitcoff have written a book that packs a double punch. Their experiences as advocates of teenagers are moving, and their outline of what teenagers need and deserve from the foster care system is convincing, to the point, and should be required reading for all caseworkers, foster parents, judges and lawyers. Most persuasive is their contention that what these teenagers need above all is attention from professionals who are just as interested in their intellectual development as in their emotional health. These young people are in desperate need of the hope, freedom, and opportunities that only education can offer. -Leon Botstein, President of Bard College

Like the most innovative social entrepreneurs, Krebs and Pitcoff have discovered strength and ability where others saw only need. By training youths in the foster care system to become powerful self-advocates, they have developed a pragmatic solution for a system that must be repaired. Anyone working with youth would benefit from the lessons revealed in this book. -David Bornstein, author, How to Change The World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas

This excellent book offers policymakers and service providers a compelling portrait of the foster care system as well as a set of practical suggestions for reform. The authors deserve to be commended for their dedication, perseverance, humility, and, above all, original thinking. They have two goals: helping teenagers who are about to "age out" of the foster care system prepare for lives that are independent and productive, while also working with them and through them to change the foster care system to be effective and empowering. Individuals and society are able to go "beyond the foster care system." -Frank H. Wu, dean of Wayne State University Law School, author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White

This book offers brilliant insights into helping disadvantaged teenagers turn their lives around. It is gripping to read, offering very engaging stories of young people struggling to find a place in the adult world. -Francine Cournos, author, City of One, professor of clinical psychiatry, Columbia University