Denver actor explores childhood in kinship care
Nearly half of the children living in foster care in Colorado are living in kinship care, which means they're living with relatives, neighbors, or friends. Raise the Future offers Family Support Services to help foster and adoptive families navigate the trauma that children have experienced, and that includes kinship families. Raise the Future is also partnered with the Department of Human Services to maintain and display the Heart Gallery, which is a display of professionally shot photographs of children living in foster care who are eligible for adoption.
Recently, Raise the Future hired a production company and professional actors to shoot a video about the Heart Gallery for its 20th anniversary. One of the actors hired for the video shoot has a personal connection to kinship care.
Andre Jones, Jr. is a professional photographer and a professional actor with several credits to his name. In the Heart Gallery Anniversary video, he played a teen living in foster care who is getting his picture taken for the display. The casting was a coincidence, but Jones has firsthand knowledge of the scenario. He and his two sisters suddenly entered foster care when he was 10 years old.
"Everything just like flips on its head, not really sure what is going on. I'm also trying to grieve, and everything is changing around me, so it's quite difficult to do," he told CBS News Colorado.
Domestic violence left Jones and his sisters without a safe place to live.
"The couple that took us in, they were very soothing. There was like a Wii. They would like use a lot of things to like distract us. They slid in some therapy," Jones explained.
For Jones and his sisters, foster care was a soft place to land, and soon his grandparents stepped in, eventually adopting the siblings.
"I'm very grateful that my grandparents were the ones to take all three of us," he said.
Life with his grandparents was good. After everything the children had gone through, their grandparents may have been a little overprotective.
"I've been processing the fact that I've been isolated in a way. Just because, like to think in a parents mindset, you've got your daughter's kids, you don't want anything bad to happen to them seeing that has happened in the past, you want to keep them in the home."
As Jones gets older and builds his life as an adult, he's revisiting some of the trauma he experienced as a child. He's hoping to heal the hurt.
"My goal is to have a secure attachment style, but there is that fear of abandonment because my parents were ripped away from me," he explained. "That's part of the reason I dipped into acting to find a safe place to explore those ideas and give myself vulnerability in that way."
Jones knows the exact right nuance required for playing a teen in foster care, that balance between adversity and hope.
LINK: Wednesday's Child on CBS Colorado
For more information about services for kinship care families or to learn more about the Heart Gallery, call Raise the Future at (303) 755-4756 or 1(800) 451-5246 or go to the Raise the Future website.
