Peace4Kids: Gathering Community to Nurture and Empower Foster Youth

ZAID GAYLE – CHL 2008 is the creator and executive director of Peace4Kids, a safe haven for foster children in the Compton area of Los Angeles. Based on the idea that community, rather than individuals, is the most reliable stand-in for the families of these youths, Peace4Kids has blossomed in its 13 years. From a nonexistent budget at its inception, it now commands a $500,000 annual budget. It deploys four full-time staffers, and more than 100 adult volunteers, among them former foster children who now work as researchers and advocates for foster care reform. Gayle, meanwhile, has continued to innovate. Since receiving his Community Health Leaders award in 2008, he has launched a pilot project to formalize and measure features in the existing program so that a model can be developed in other states. He has also worked to change California’s existing foster care laws and enforce them as well as gather data to improve foster care nationwide.

CHL: Please tell us how the Peace4Kids model started.

ZG: We founded Peace4Kids around 13 years ago. A close friend was a social worker for a foster family agency in Long Beach. She told me that the youth on her case-load tended to be socially isolated and estranged from their brothers and sisters who were also in foster care or their extended community, which we felt was related to poor outcomes. When we looked realistically at what we could provide, we decided community would be the best resolution.

We started with a theory based predominantly on research by John Bowlby, (the late psychiatrist who developed the Attachment Theory, which emphasizes that childhood experiences and relationships are key to development.) Our idea was that because foster youth traditionally had poor attachments to adults as a result of early childhood trauma with their parents, they needed an environment where they felt safe enough to build healthy relationships. Our model was based on the concept that foster youth will develop a sense of belonging and permanence in a responsive, consistent, and culturally sensitive environment where volunteers are trained to interpret their needs. The foster children have the opportunity to form organic relationships with them. You avoided the traditional model of one-on-one, which is scary for kids who have been through trauma with adults. This is less scary.

CHL: How does Peace4Kids work and how many children does it currently serve?

ZG: Last year we served 207 youth. They start out at age 4 and go to age 24. They go to different developmentally oriented programs. About 30 youths aged 16 to 19 in our teen program get life-skill training and support to assist them in becoming self sufficient, in addition to the relationship building. We have a gender-specific program for 30 young men and women ages 13 to 15 where we build the social-emotional skills they need to move through adolescence. There are about 50 to 60 youths in our creative and early education program, which is for children aged 7 to 12 . It exposes them to educational opportunities in creative ways. They’re broken up into three age-appropriate classes and can learn anything from the sciences and arts to health and advocacy. We have 25 children in the Peace Garden group ages 4 to 6 who are taught about resolving conflict through non-violent ways and other health-specific concepts. They can be exposed to a cooking class, healthy eating habits, science class or any number of things that help to build their confidence in their abilities.

CHL: What are some of the outcomes of your pilot project?

ZG: What we see with our older alumni is that they have started to take on the banner of advocacy and system reform. Our youth worked very hard last year to get passage of legislation that increased the legal age of foster care from 18 to 21 in California. They have been doing a lot of work on their own: a research paper on the culture of foster care, for instance. We are hoping to take some of the empirical evidence they’ve gathered to influence foster care policy.

CHL: How did you come to be interested in this field?

ZG: Two ways. My mother came through child welfare, which was what they called foster care in those days. My father worked for the Department of Children and Family Services. He was the deputy director – and he ran the command post. My dad headed the branch of the agency that would send out the social worker or police officer in charge of an investigation to see if the child needed to be removed from the home after an allegation came into the hotline.

A lot of my mother’s seven brothers and sisters were partly raised with me. I didn’t understand: why are they here? And as I got older, they had a lot of the problems that many foster youth have: drug abuse, incarceration, mental health issues. One of my uncles was only a few years older and was raised as my brother – he still deals with incarceration and other issues. I couldn’t understand what made him different. Later my mother explained he had experienced early childhood trauma. I felt like it was my responsibility to not have that cycle repeated.

CHL: Your program started with a great deal of research.

ZG: We had the fortune in our early days of having social workers involved in the development of the program. I just wanted to go in the neighborhood where these kids are experiencing this trauma; I didn’t care what it was. It started with the peace garden: We were going to grow organic vegetables. I wasn’t originally interested in the empirical part, but my partners—one being a social worker and the other an early-education professor and foster parent—wanted to do something more research based, so then we could expand the model. We’re getting there now. The youth-led research project will be the last empirical research to help prove our model of community-as-family.

CHL: What did you do with your CHL project funding?

ZG: We started a pilot youth advocacy and research project. It’s interesting because we do really follow a youth-led model concept. The first thing they decided on was a campaign about youth and foster care and what they really need. The next was a speaker’s bureau and advocacy. The youths said: “Let’s look at some of the policies that have been developed. How can we amend these policies?” Not that we wanted to reinvent the wheel. The youths decided that they did not want to take a completely adversarial role with the policy-makers. They wanted to help build in cultural competencies.

After they began a grassroots campaign to support legislation that had been introduced, we hoped to move from the state government and address our model in other counties that have similar foster care populations. We talked to other states that are interested in the model. The hope is that our youths will become trainers to help other agencies.

Currently, they are addressing a law that already passed. It was a school and education bill. Essentially, the youths realized that, on average, foster kids move twice a year, which disrupted their education and caused them to fall behind in school. As a result, high school graduation rates for foster youth are abysmal, and so are their dropout rates. With good intentions, the law held that whenever foster youths moved, they should be able to stay in their schools. However, there are practical barriers that lawmakers could not have foreseen in a county the size of Los Angeles. For instance, if a kid’s home school is in Compton but she is moved to Pomona in the middle of the school year, it would be impossible for her to stay in her home school because it would require that she spend 5 hours of each day in transit. So our youth advocates are looking at this legislation and hoping to amend it to make it practical for the foster youth, school districts, social workers, and guardians. Once our youth advocates have developed practical solutions to implementing the law, they will go into schools and educate social workers, teachers and other youths about it.

CHL: Did you encounter any surprises or obstacles in the course of your project?

ZG: One of the things we were hoping to do was identify specific strengths of youths in foster care. Kids in foster care have some of their own culture, so naturally their own strengths. However, we did not identify a wide framework. The empirical evidence was not as wide as we needed it to be. The pilot was too small.

One of the problems we had with youths doing the research was they would become emotionally involved with their peers when they interviewed them. They would produce convoluted data from their discussions. That’s because they were also trying to counsel them. We realized that for the one-on-one data we would have to bring in research interns. So one associate brought in a doctoral student to collect the data. She looked young, and the kids assumed she was in foster care too. As a result we got good, clean data.

CHL: So much is written about abuse in foster care. How is it that your youth researchers didn’t choose abuse as a research or advocacy priority?

ZG: They specifically rejected the idea of dissecting that particular trauma from their research. They said that the moment they were pulled out of their homes, it was traumatic. They said that if you go to a new foster home, you may be with people who eat differently, worship differently—that is all traumatic. They said, “Listen, trauma is the norm for us. We don’t want to talk about just one part of it.”

CHL: What are your plans for Peace4Kids over the next year? The next five years?

ZG: My vision for Peace4Kids is to formalize the broader findings of our Youth Led Study project, and train our youth to advocate for system changed based on that research. From a more long-term perspective: I am hopeful that our current program evaluation tools will provide the evidence we need to grow our model, so that more foster youth around the country can participate in interventions like ours.

To learn more about Zaid Gayle and his work, visit Peace4Kids.