(Interview with Flaimahmy, Wednesday, May 12, 2010)

“One of the things that I am real careful to do is tell people that I’m not going to tell you about our kids so that you feel sorry for them.” Kimberley A. Shellman-Borna, CEO, The Center for Children and Young Adults, Atlanta Metropolitan area.

FM:  You are the new Chief Executive Officer of The Center for Children and Young Adults.  Tell us about the Center and what you do.

KS:  The Center is a shelter and home for children.  Over the years [there has been] a lot of good progress I could say that the state has made on placing children.  Younger children are being placed in foster care homes.  But, it’s harder to place adolescents in foster care homes.  We are a home for children and primarily serve kids ages 12 to 17.  We do have a transitional living program for kids ages 17 to 21.  A lot of our kids graduate into that program because at 18 we don’t want to just turn them out on the streets.  Even though we all think we’re grow at 18, we all know, particularly mothers, that they are not grown.

My job is to really steer and guide the direction of the Center.  I am the person who keeps the lights on and pays the bills and oversees the programming aspects.  I have a Director of Residential Services who is great.  I set the vision for that.  We are trying to mix life skills with fun activities, with educational activities so that we can better prepare these kids for self-sufficiency in their adult lives.  They’re going to need it more than kids who have parents there everyday.

FM:  What motivated you to become an advocate for the care and protection of abused and neglected children?

KS:  You know, believe it or not it’s something that I’ve always wanted to do.  It actually started when I was very young, in the first grade.  I had a first grade teacher who was very racially prejudiced toward the two black students in the class.  I felt like they were very mistreated.  My concern for kids really began when I was young.  It was something I could not articulate; I knew it was wrong.  I didn’t know exactly what I was witnessing but it was something that happened when I was young.  I think when kids see that it makes an impression on them.  For me, it made an impression.  It was something that I wanted to always work towards fixing and making sure that kids were protected.  It made me sensitive at age six.

In addition to that, my grandmother, who’s ninety-one years old, grew up in a “home.”   Her mother died when she was two.  Her father could not care for her and he placed her in a “home” in the Chesapeake Bay area.  She grew up in the “home.”  My whole life I’ve heard stories of  my grandmother talking about growing up in the “home” and the things that made her able to be successful when she got out of the home as a teenager, starting self-sufficiency, the things that were helpful.

I’m always telling my staff that my grandmother always said that it’s the ones who were caring and interested and compassionate and flexible, it wasn’t the staff who barked at her all the time who really made her the person she is today.  My grandmother built a very successful family who she is the matriarch of even at the age of ninety-one, out of no family.  That was always a motivating factor for me.

FM:  Do you find, as much as people are saddened about children who are abused or neglected, that it is difficult to get them involved in helping these children?

KS:  I think everybody wants to help.  I think some people don’t know how to help.  I think some people have ideas and that’s not necessarily the help that we need for these kids.  One of the things, especially in working with teenagers, when you work with teenagers they are always listening to everything that you are saying.  One of the things that I am real careful to do is tell people that I’m not going to tell you about our kids so that you feel sorry for them.  I don’t want you to feel sorry for them.  I want you to actually admire them.  I want you to see the struggles and the challenges that they’ve overcome.  I want you to see how hard they are working toward self-sufficiency and I want you to invest in their futures.

I think if people can reach out to organizations like our organization and ask us, “How can I help?,” that usually gives a better help inducement than having to come up with an idea on their own.  I do think that people want to help.  There are a lot of charities and organizations out there and I always tell people that I understand that people have their own causes and I encourage people to support their own causes.  Nowadays with the economy and the hits that the foundations have had, we’re all really struggling  just to keep the lights on.  The operational expenses of an organization are really really hard.  A lot of people have said they want to fund a program but as a part of that program you have to be able to pay your folks who are doing the administrative work and making sure that the bills get paid and that type of thing as well.  That’s really the struggle.

FM:  How do you cope with the stress of this position?

KS:  You know, I am a private person of faith.  I think the more work that I do that is closer to the front line of working with kids, the more private and strong my faith is.  I would not be able to stay and witness some of the things that I see and hear from these kids without my faith.  I also think a lot of it comes from my family; I have a very very good husband.  If I didn’t have such a good husband who is such a good daddy I wouldn’t be able to be true to my daughter as well as being able to take care of these other kids.  I have a good partnership.  I wouldn’t be able to do what I do as a single mom and I really admire the single moms who do it.

FM:  Do you feel optimistic about where we are as a society in protecting our children?

KS:  I don’t; I don’t sometimes.  I work with teens now and it’s been really amazing to me that when I start to talk about the teens and the kids at the Center how many people say, “Well, where are the little kids; I thought you had little kids there.”   What they forget is that our teens were little kids and now they’re teens and now they’re even more vulnerable because they can’t be placed; they’re too old to be placed in foster homes.

Foster parents aren’t willing to take them at this age because they are going to age out to the system and be in society ill-prepared.  I just really really worry that…what happens with our kids is when they are neglected and abused and we as a system and as a community and as families are not able to adequately provide for them and respond to them…then they end of getting into a little bit of trouble.  They’re skipping school and they start doing a little vandalism, they start shoplifting and then all of a sudden they are juvenile delinquents.  They always forget that they were abused and neglected and that’s how they ended up down this path.  Then people are a lot harder on them at that point.  Then people say, “I don’t know why you would help kids who don’t want to help themselves.”  You know, these kids don’t know how to help themselves; most kids don’t know how to help themselves.  Kids in healthy families don’t always know how to help themselves.  That’s why parents are there to help them.

I guess I want to be optimistic.  I am really optimistic about some of the changes and new things that we are doing at the Center to really try to build a better future for these kids and help them to understand that the best is yet to come.  I had a conversation with a girl a couple of weeks ago and I said to her, “These are not the best years of your life.  I understand that no one wants to live at the Center for Children and Young Adults, even if it is a great place.  No one wants to live here; you want to live with your family or a family.”  And, she said, “What did you say?” I started to reiterate, and she said, “No, what did you say about my life?”  I said, “This is not the best time in your life but that time in your life is yet to come.”  She looked at me and said, “I did not know that; I thought this was it.”  That was so shocking to me, that that was the way these kids feel.

FM:  If you could make three immediate changes that you believe would have significant positive impact on the lives of the children you serve, what would those changes be?

KS:  Three changes…that’s a good question.  I think I would really like to have some support for the kids which we are working towards but we need some help.  I’d really like to have some support around computer training and preparation for college.  So many people don’t realize that a lot of the kids who come to us are really really smart kids.  They just have a lot of gaps in schooling.  What happens is they only have enough credits to be in the ninth grade when they should be a junior or a senior.  That really challenges them to get a high school degree and be able to go to college.  Yet, if you look at their grades over the years, they’ve had really good grades despite their struggles.

I would really like to invest more in these kids in education to get them so that they could graduate high school more timely and that they could be prepared for college because when I got here most of my seventeen year olds didn’t even know what the SAT or the PSAT was.  That to me is very sad.  That would be the first thing, is really some help to invest in their futures and to really problem solve their gaps in education because that’s really going to be a big key to their success.

The second thing is, if I could really make an impact, I would like to find a way to engage these kids with their families more, because even kids who come from homes where their parents haven’t always done right by them, they just want to be with their families, they just want to see them.  I would like to find a way for us to more positively engage their families.  It seems like in the system that we have set up for child abuse and neglect it’s so punitive against the parents who have done wrong by the children, and you know what, the parents deserve that, but the kids don’t deserve that and the kids are the ones who get punished by not being able to be with their parents.

The third thing that I’d like to do is to be able to show them that their lives will be better, to show them that they have a future, to be able to show them kids who’ve been through the system, to have them come and talk with them and encourage them and help them to know what the important things are that they need to do to succeed .  You know we like to think that we are these educated adults who’ve worked in the system a long time and we know what it takes for them to get where they’ve gotten.  But, really only someone who’s actually done it really knows and that’s who the kids really need to hear from.

FM:  You and your husband David, have a daughter.

KS:  Yes, we do.

FM:  You are also foster parents.

KS:  We’ve had a foster child since February.  We’re hoping to get another placement in May before the month is out, possibly in June.  We only foster kids zero to four because our daughter is four and a half and we were delightfully counseled by our daughter who wants to remain the oldest.  We also received counseling that you should not change the order of your family especially when you have young children.  So, we just take in kids zero to four.  We do that in Cherokee County.

FM:  Does your daughter understand the concept of foster siblings?

KS:  You know, it’s interesting.  We’ve been very careful how we talk to her about it.  When our foster daughter, Maggie, first came to us in January and there were some boys before that we had talked to her about.  First, Baleigh, [daughter], was worried about whether she would ever be a foster child.  I told her, “ No because you have a lot of family resources.”  She said, “What are resources?”  I said, “That’s your grandmother and your aunts and  your uncles.  So if anything ever happened to mommy and daddy you would have all of these people who would be fighting over wanting to take care of you.  The kids who come into foster care are kids who don’t have a lot of family resources.  You are really lucky that you do and it’s very very kind and generous of you to share your family resources with other children.”

That’s how we’ve talked about it.  It comes with the regular jealousness and things like that with foster kids in the house.  I think she’s growing more and more and understanding it more and more.  Now, with the kids at the Center, when she comes to the Center, she knows that the kids live here.  She always tells me when she gets in the car, “You know mommy I really do feel for those kids, I really do care about them and I know you’re going to take good care of them.”

So one of the things that I am accomplishing through my job and through foster parenting is something  I wanted to do with my daughter; I wanted her to have that compassion at a really early age especially being an only child who has a lot more toys than I ever had and goes a lot more places than I ever went.  You worry about them taking all of that for granted and I really wanted her to think that those things are special and want to share those things, as well as just really learn compassion for other people at a young age.  I think that she is doing that.  That’s important to me and my husband.

FM:  Is it difficult  to see a foster child leave your home or are you really happy to see them adopted?

KS:  It’s really funny because when you go through the foster parenting classes, everybody always worries when a foster child goes home that everybody is going to be so sad and then they tell you that most people do the “happy dance.”   It doesn’t mean that you don’t love them.  It’s like taking your nieces and your nephews for a week.  At the end of the week you still love your your nieces and nephews but if they are going back to a situation that’s good you feel good about it.

If the system did what it was supposed to do and the child is going back with a family member then that is something you feel really good about.  I told my husband a long time ago when we talked about this that it is not you, it’s about the child.  If you put your emotions there then you are happy for them rather than sad for yourself that you have the loss.  You definitely feel the loss and sometimes you feel the loss a week later more than you feel it at that instant moment.

You learn when you have foster kids that they grieve, even when they are a year old, they grieve for their parents.   Our foster daughter cried at night for her parents.  It was very very hard.  At times I felt like I had kidnapped her because she so wanted to be with her parents.  When she got to go back with her grandparents and her mom there was that sense of that’s where she wants to be and needs to be.  You just want to make sure that that system has done what it’s supposed to do and they’ve done it in a safe way.

FM:  What do you believe is your greatest contribution to the children you serve?

KS:  I would probably say my greatest contribution to the children that I serve is just my compassion.  It’s because a lot of people can do things for them and a lot of people can raise money and a lot of people can build nice places and a lot of people can hire good staff.  My staff would probably say that I am compassionate to a fault because I feel so much for them.  I have definitely had the kids who have been in the organizations that I’ve worked for usually tell me that I am one of the kindest people that they’ve met.  That is what I want them to feel.  I really want to teach them about kindness.   That’s probably the greatest thing that I have been able to give them.

FM:  We at Flaimahmy believe that you are a Fly Mommy.   In your own words tell us why you are a Fly Mommy.

KS:  Well, I guess it depends on the definition of Fly Mommy.  If a Fly Mommy is somebody who tries to do a million things at once and is successful at fifty percent of them, then I guess I am a Fly Mommy.

For more information visit Umbrellaweb.org or call (770) 333-9447  Ext. 105