"Aging Out" of Foster Care

"When current and former foster children formed a group to help youths who had turned 18 and were “aging out” of the system, one of the first things they did was hold a luggage drive.
“We saw that a lot of the kids were taking their clothes out in garbage bags,” said Chilton Brown, 23, a former foster child who spent ages 3 to 18 as a ward of the state, bouncing around 15 family homes or group residences.

A life contained in green plastic bags: it is the kind of humiliating detail that hits home hardest among foster youths themselves. It is also a telling sign of how unprepared many of these 18-year-olds are to live on their own, without families, jobs or school diplomas to shore them up."By Erik Eckholm, N.Y. Times Link to Article (last visited 1-29-07 NVS)