Two brothers survive foster care. Now one pushes for reform with the other in mind
In a hallway inside Indiana’s Capitol, the young man walks up to a state senator and gives her a quick hug.
“Hey, it’s Josh Christian,” he tells Sen. Erin Houchin, a member of the Senate’s child welfare committee. “I went to Capitol Hill and I got published. It was crazy!”
The encounter would have seemed more than unlikely just a few years ago, when Christian was one of the thousands of kids in Indiana’s foster care system. In about 18 years, he was moved to 18 different places. The experiences were so deflating he had given up on ever finding his forever family.
Now, the 22-year-old senior at Marian University is using his life story to improve the system for the ones who will come after him.
Christian is part of a growing movement of former foster youth who have become advocates. Young adults testifying at hearings and counseling lawmakers. Offering ideas on housing solutions, family preservation funding, education inequities and support for youth aging out.
“Somebody who has lived through that experience, sitting in front of you, is starkly different than someone like me in a suit just telling you the story,” said Mike Fonkert, campaign director at Kansas Appleseed, a nonprofit justice center that represents vulnerable Kansans and works with former foster children.
“We believe if you own your story and tell it on your terms, it can be a weapon for positive instead of negative. … It has a lot of power for change and it gives those young people strength they may not have had before.”
From California to Kansas to Massachusetts, former foster children are working to improve outcomes for those who age out of the system.
Growing up in care was lonely, Christian said. But now he has connected with former foster kids across the country.
“I believe that we truly can make a change,” said Christian, who has strongly advocated for extending foster care beyond the age of 18. “These kids are in the system, not because they did anything wrong. It’s because they had wrong done to them.”
His way to help change foster care is to tell his story.
Life in the system
Christian was 2 — the youngest of six children — when he went into foster care.
The state of Indiana had removed all six kids from their home for severe neglect and their mother’s continued substance abuse. There were times, he said, when he and his siblings were given drugs themselves. That’s why, he figures, he has little memory of those early years with his biological family and first stays in foster care.
In first grade — after he had been in several placements — Christian and his older brother and sister were moved to a home that would be their longest stay.
“It was also my worst,” said Christian, who by that time was already suffering from early trauma and was acting out and struggling to keep up in school.
From ages 7 to 11, he and his brother and sister lived in that home. In fact, the family was going to adopt all three. It seemed like a good fit.
But what social workers didn’t see — nor teachers or other adults in the kids’ lives — was the physical and mental abuse going on inside those walls.
Eleven days before the adoption would be final, a young Christian, eyes filled with tears, told his teacher about how he and his siblings were being treated. About the abuse. He knew his brother and sister didn’t want him to tell, especially with it being his brother’s birthday and the worry that he wouldn’t get his presents.
“I told my friend and they convinced me to tell the teacher,” he said. “I remember her being shocked. And then taking me to the principal and some investigator came in. … I was the youngest. I did stand up. But I was extremely scared.”
That day, when they got off the bus at the foster home, police were there.
The trio ended up in a new placement, but after a while Christian and his sister were moved. His brother Kenneth stayed in that home and ended up getting adopted.
The sister was eventually adopted by another family and now lives elsewhere in the Midwest.
Josh and Kenneth were always close, even when they didn’t live together. They would call each other “Bubby.”
Kenneth was always protective of his brother. When he was around, Josh knew he didn’t have to worry about anything. Josh was 4 or 5 when someone stole his bike; his brother took a baseball bat and got it back.
When Christian was 13, he ended up in a juvenile detention center for about a week, only because there was nowhere else for him to go.
“My room was like these bricks around you and a window about yea big,” he said, motioning with his hands to describe a small space. “... It was very restrictive. I didn’t have any of my clothing, I didn’t have any of my stuff.”
Christian recently had begun attending church. It was a safe place for him. But now, he was mad at God.
“It was kind of a wake up moment for me,” he said.
Before long, he no longer wished for the same thing each birthday — to be reunited with his biological mother. That same year he went before his family court judge with a request.
I no longer want to be adopted.
He had written out what he wanted to say, though he’s sure there were plenty of misspellings because “my education was not that good.” The judge “said it was fine.”
Since he was 2, adoption had been the goal. But he had just been in his 13th home and “I was heartbroken when I left.”
So he wanted to change his plan and age out. That meant he stayed in placements that were strictly for fostering, not adopting.
“I did not think I was going to find my forever family,” Christian said. “I didn’t want to call people mom and dad again.
“I did not want to get my hopes up one last time. … I really just wanted to have some consistency and peace in my life. I didn’t really get that from the system.”
Saying ‘I’m sorry’
When he was a teen, Christian saw a familiar face in high school. Kenneth.
“I saw him pretty much every day — gym, study hall,” he said. “We found the time, if time was not there. We grew extremely close.”
Even today, Christian lights up when he talks about him, the guy “who was the coolest kid in school,” the one everyone loved and who could make them laugh.
Both were athletic and competitive. Both were team captains and broke track records — they could run a mile in under five minutes, Christian said. And they always wanted to race again some day, to see who was faster.
Christian said he struggled in high school, but was able to graduate and begin college. He followed the advice of a former foster parent who shared with him the services that were available to help kids once they aged out, such as money for tuition and housing.
But while a young student at St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Indiana, Christian found himself angry and taken back to what had happened during all those years in foster homes. He knew what he needed to do.
“It was time for me to be OK with everything and let go of feelings that hadn’t been dealt with,” he said. “I decided I was going to go back to different homes and tell them ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I forgive you,’ because I can’t weigh that on my shoulders anymore.”
Kenneth wasn’t so sure it was a good idea. But he supported him and would talk to him before and after the contacts with those past foster parents.
Christian worked the phones and found some addresses. He talked to families he had lived with.
“The ones I could find the addresses for, I would travel to those,” he said.
He even went back to that one placement — the worst one — where the abuse occurred.
“It was a scary drive for me,” he said. “But I needed to do what I needed to do.”
The foster mom was there. Christian was respectful.
“I apologized for some things that I had done, acting up,” he said. “But I let them know that I forgave them. She kind of ignored it or didn’t hear the ‘I forgive you,’ because she assumed she had done nothing wrong.
“I said what I needed to say and left.”
He had learned that he wasn’t always going to hear from others what he wanted.
“A lot of the time, the wrong that had been done to me, others did not recognize that.”
But he was growing stronger by the day. A couple years earlier, the week before his 18th birthday, Christian’s former case manager, Matthew Oswald — who had become his mentor — reached out to him with a question.
The two had become close during the time Christian was in care. And late one night, Christian got a call from him.
“He said, ‘Me and my wife have been thinking,’” Christian recalls him saying. “‘If you’re OK with it, we would like you to come live with us.’”
Josh called Kenneth, like he always did when he needed advice and guidance. They talked it over and the little brother decided that’s what he wanted.
“I moved in,” he said, “and about six months later, I sat them down and said, ‘I’ve got to talk to you about something.’
“I said, ‘Hey, I would like to call you guys Mom and Dad.’ They were crying, I was crying.
“I got my forever home.”
‘Hey Bubby ...’
Soon after the visits with former foster families to reconcile with his past, Christian got a call about Kenneth.
It was early in the morning, and the words hit hard.
Your brother is in a coma.
Christian said his injuries were self-inflicted. He knew his brother had struggled with mental illness in his teen years and that it wasn’t properly addressed in foster care or after he was adopted.
Within hours, Christian was on his way to see him. His new dad went with him.
They traveled to a Texas hospital. Christian would go back and forth from Indiana for the next six weeks. He called several times a day.
During one visit, he left a radio with his brother. He tuned it to K-Love, a Christian radio station.
“I wanted to make sure if he had any unfinished business, just maybe he could take care of that,” Christian said. Medical personnel left the radio on.
On the third trip, doctors sat down with Christian and said it was time to let Kenneth go.
“I just kind of held him and talked to him,” Christian said of those last moments. “We were supposed to have one last race, him and I. Never got to do the mile. So I told him, ‘Run to Jesus.’ And I told him we’d have our race soon.”
Nearly a year later, Christian got a final note from his brother in the mail. He is not sure who sent it. It began, “Hey Bubby...”
His brother told him he understood how hard this would be and encouraged Christian to take care of himself.
Since he was younger, Christian knew he wanted to help other kids. But after Kenneth’s death, he knew he couldn’t wait until after college to get involved.
“I realized I was not promised another day,” Christian said. “I realized I could make changes right now.”
He’s been involved in nearly a dozen state and national organizations helping foster kids. He’s spoken to Congress and many Indiana legislators.
Right now, he’s advocating for a better education system. Eventually, maybe, he will more widely share his brother’s story and the need for more mental health treatment for young people in the system.
“There were many folks like him who have a big smile on his face, perfect grades,” Christian said. “You just don’t know. If you don’t provide services to the kids that are thriving — it doesn’t mean they don’t need services — you could be doing a wrong to them. And I think my brother was done wrong to. I think our state could have helped him more.
“They could have given him services. It’s very wrong how our state or a lot of states thought mental health may not exist.”
He died before Christian became an outspoken advocate.
“I wish my Bubby could’ve known that,” he said. “It would have been the coolest thing for me. He’d have been proud of me; he’d do it with me. It’d be cool to have him by my side.”
This story was originally published December 22, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
