What Happens When We Keep Showing Up

At a First Star gathering of 30 Los Angeles women this past February, alumna Amy Duarte spotted First Star CEO Lyndsey C. Wilson and announced she had a gift. She reached into her bag and pulled out a business card. Her name. Her title. Her first full-time job.

“She was so, so proud,” Wilson says.

To understand what that card meant, Duarte recalls her experience in a foster home where she was starved, stolen from, and, on the days she was fed, given food with roaches in it. Her social worker never asked to speak with her alone. Then a temporary replacement social worker walked in and told the foster mother to leave the room.

“I need to tell her everything,” Duarte remembers thinking. “I don’t know if she can do anything, but I need to get it off my chest.” The new social worker not only changed her placement, she also asked a question nobody had asked before: what do you want to do after high school?

“I guess college,” Duarte recalls saying. She had no idea what that meant. “I just knew college was an escape.”

The social worker told her about First Star’s Los Angeles-based Academy program, hosted at UCLA, where foster youth live in the dorms a month every summer, plus Saturday sessions each month, for all four years of high school. Her former foster mother said no: “She’s not going to go to college.” Her new placement said “yes.”

That first summer, Duarte says, “college stopped being somewhere to escape and became somewhere to become the person you want to be, not someone everyone else is dictating a life for.”

Success Is in the Consistency

Founded in 1999 as a child-welfare policy organization by producer and social entrepreneur Peter Samuelson, First Star asked which kids the system failed hardest. The answer was teenagers. First Star’s Academy program set out to prove foster teens had “just as much capacity, just as much aptitude” as anyone. Fifteen years later, First Star runs Academies on 11 college campuses, half in California.

Wilson, a former Inglewood middle school principal, says the secret to the program’s success is, “Consistency. Showing up. The willingness to talk about hard things but still maintain high expectations.” Staff go to court hearings and sit with counselors. If a scholar’s placement moves to the Antelope Valley, First Star pays for the Uber back to the Saturday Academy. 

“Here in Los Angeles, 100 percent of our students graduate from high school,” Wilson says. “In the state of California, the high school graduation rate for foster youth is about 65 percent.”  Duarte herself turned down a full ride to UCLA for one at UC Davis and now works with foster youth herself, with Sacramento and higher-education policy as her end goal.

“I thought I was wasting my time,” Duarte says. “Once I got to college, I realized everything at First Star was for a reason.”