‘I’d be in jail’: The former foster kids who are rewriting their fate

But many young people cannot remain safely at home, and don’t have a good experience in foster care, so more programs like the Foyer help plug the gap.

Uniting’s head of permanency support Anita Le Lay said it was about providing young people with support but also individual choice.

“We are raising kids in a system that is really tough on them and Uniting thinks that to end care at 18 is wrong. We don’t do it to other kids. Why are we doing it to these highly vulnerable, highly marginalised, often traumatised kids?” she said.

“Staying with a carer, good or bad, is not for everybody and I think these kids grow up with so little choice and so few opportunities for empowerment, to be able to choose to live in a Foyer just represents something different.”

Rather than extended care, the NSW government provides some support directly to young people leaving foster care at 18. However, Le Lay said it was “very fragmented, hard to access, and almost every kid who accesses it is already in crisis”.

Brennan was put into care when he was 13 because of abuse and drugs in his family home. At first, he was put into kinship care with his aunt, then he was moved to three or four refuges. His father won back custody when Brennan was 17, but the abuse and drug use started again.

The young people at Foyer Central must pay rent and abide by the terms of a tenancy agreement, and will get a rental reference at the end.Credit:Edwina Pickles

“I got thrown through walls and I ran away and put myself in homelessness,” he said. “I was rough sleeping on trains.”

After six months, Brennan found help through the Ted Noffs Foundation in Randwick, and decided to cut ties with his girlfriend and other friends who were pressuring him to engage in theft and robbery. He expects to stay at The Foyer for the full two years and would love to work in the horse racing industry.

Trindall, 21, bounced in and out of foster care for most of her adolescence, returning to her mother’s custody for the final time at around age 16.

“My experience in foster care was really bad and if I’d had to wait until I was 18, I would have just left,” she said. “It was really a life or death situation in the foster house, so I don’t want to sound too dark, but I could have been dead.”

Yet Trindall also found living in her mother’s household “toxic” and needed to get out to both retain the relationship with her mother and to protect herself, so The Foyer came along at the right time.

“We’ve all experienced a level of trauma so that we don’t have to be fake around each other.”

Ty Courtney, 20

Like Brennan, Trindall decided to cut ties with many of her friends who were using drugs. She is now working at the Wayside Chapel op-shop and studying a Diploma in Community Services.

Even young people with more positive experiences of out-of-home care need support to launch into adult life.

Chan-Hampton, 19, counts herself as one of the lucky ones because she was placed in kinship care with her aunt and grew up in “a very loving family” and was able to retain an “amazing relationship” with her mother.

Chan-Hampton and several of her siblings were removed from their mother’s care at a young age because of their mother’s drug and alcohol abuse.

Chan-Hampton, who is studying social work and wants to work with young people, said the coaches and counsellors at The Foyer taught her practical skills like budgeting but also more interpersonal skills such as how to set boundaries – something she did not learn at home, being one of nine siblings.

“I really needed that independence,” Chan-Hampton said. “It was just too overcrowded for me especially because I’m kinda in the middle. There was zero privacy.”

Courtney, 20, had a better experience in foster care than many other young people – he was removed as a baby and lived in 12 different homes in his early years, but then had the same foster carer from the age of six to 19.

But his relationship with his carer became rocky when Courtney turned 18. His carer wanted to support him, while Courtney was straining for independence without really having the skills to sustain it, and they clashed. Now that he has moved out to Foyer Central, he has rebuilt his relationship with his former carer and is grateful to her.

Courtney is now a second-year apprentice as a mechanic, and his goal is to work making electric cars.

The key for him was that the support from The Foyer was “not in-your-face parenting but shadow parenting” where the young people run their own lives and staff provide backup support when needed.

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As valuable as the life skill lessons are, the young people say the connections with their peers, and the support they can offer each other, are just as important.

“We’ve all experienced a level of trauma so that we don’t have to be fake around each other because they know why we act the way we do,” Courtney said. “You can just be yourself. It’s so nice.”

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