Raise Me Up

More than 500,000 children in this country live in foster care; l20,000 will not be able to return to their families. In Philadelphia, a new public awareness campaign, Raise Me Up, hopes to enlist volunteers and mentors for those children.

In a press conference yesterday, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, and Department of Human Services Commissioner Anne Marie Ambrose said that the city cannot do the job alone—that its citizens must step up and take a strong role in the lives of the children who are at risk of growing up homeless, despondent, less likely to complete high school and more likely to end up in a life of crime, addiction and poverty.

The Honorable Max Baer, justice of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court, said that ideally children should be raised by their own families, if possible. When they cannot and are placed in foster care, he or she has a better chance of success if there is a mentor involved in his life. “Foster parents are wonderful,” he said, “but foster care is a flawed system. Children need permanent families.”

We agree. If a child can not be returned to his birth family, we believe that adoption should be his or her goal. Meanwhile, mentors and volunteers can help boost a child’s confidence and contribute to his self-esteem. But an adoptive family should be sought for him before he succumbs to the devastating outcomes inevitably visited on children without permanence in their lives.