“I want to start an orphanage,” I told Laura over dinner one evening. “Not necessarily an orphanage, but something like that.”

“That’s real hard, Honey,” Laura replied. “Let’s just give to them.”

That didn’t seem like enough to me. I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened to me without Buck and the other cowboys who became like family. Without men like Robert who kept stepping into my life to help me...

The more I learned about the plight of the kids leaving foster care, the more concerned I became. Most of them didn’t have a support system. One study found that within a year of leaving the foster care system, 66 percent of the kids were homeless, in jail or dead. A staggering 80 percent of the prison population had come out of foster care. Girls in foster care were 600 percent more likely than their peers to get pregnant before age 21.

From, A Long Journey Home. Purchase on Amazon.