College Times

Issue date: 9/17/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Ryan Ruiz Cassandra Space (left) and fiance Justin McCloud, with Keira, 3, and Marcus, 5, work from their Phoenix home to make Life Unfolded a reality for transitional foster children.

Growing up in Yuma, Cassandra Spade had a lot of siblings. Seventeen to be exact. But she was never bothered by having that many children in and out of her home, sometimes sharing her bedroom, because she knew she was helping.

Spade's mom, Cindy, along with Cassandra, helped save foster children from group homes by taking them into their own home.

She was 9 years old when her mom brought her first foster brother home, and after that, she never looked back.

"My mom was a teacher and had a student in one of her classes who was going to be transferred into a group home from his mom's house," she says. "So, my mom went to the principal and told him she needed to have the day off, and went and got certified to become a foster parent. That night, my first foster brother came to live with us."

Now, at 23, Spade says she wants to make it her life's work to help foster children.

Her first step: Building a non-profit organization to help kids tap into their creative sides through sports, art and music, with the ultimate goal of helping to raise money to help them with their everyday survival.

With a humble idea and even humbler beginnings, Spade set out with her fiancé and two volunteering friends to achieve this feat.

Small Steps

Spade always knew she wanted to do something creative. She had studied interior design at the Art Institute of Phoenix and done work modeling, but she wanted to do something more meaningful.

The first person Spade went to for advice was one of her former foster sisters Amy Foxcroft. Foxcroft was removed from her home at a young age along with her seven siblings. Three were adopted. The rest were shipped out to foster care. This is when Spade and her mother stepped in to lend a helping hand.

Getting a first-hand account of what it was like was priceless, Spade says.

With the vital information about what Foxcroft wished she had when she was in foster care, Spade went to work.

She first thought she wanted to start a clothing store. She wanted to enlist the help of some of her artist friends who were willing to donate their time to make "wearable art," as she calls it. The name for the store was to be Unfolded.

But then, something didn't feel right. The entire thing felt forced. She, along with her business partner and fiancé Justin McCloud, let the idea settle for three or four months.

"One night, I couldn't sleep because I was thinking about all these kids and where they go, and then I thought, why not make our own non-profit and do it ourselves?"

She immediately thought of making the program to focus on transitional-age foster kids - 14 to 20 - because these kids usually get the short end of the stick most of the time and don't get fostered or adopted.

Cori Tyndall, the program coordinator for foster care and adoption at the Yuma chapter of the Arizona's Children Association, says regardless of what the living situation is, being a 13- to 16-year-old is a stressful time. Throw in the foster care, and it gets even harder.

"While a lot of them have experienced something that a lot of children don't experience, they're still normal teenagers, and they need the same things," she says. "I think they fall through the cracks because they don't have those extra resources that they not only thrive off of, but need too." Spade says once she has nailed down the goal of the organization, coming up with the name was easy.

"These kids can't be folded up and put away," she says. "They're kind of just being tossed aside. So this is their Life Unfolded."

Putting the Pieces Together

Because of lack of funds, the Life Unfolded store and organization hasn't actually begun operation yet.

Still in the fundraising stages, Spade's group had an auction of their own artwork on August 15, and brought in some much-needed money.

But Spade and her team are not only in search of money to help them get the ball rolling, but an actual location where they can set up shop.

They are ideally looking for a two-story building in downtown Phoenix.

The top level will be the place where the programs are held, and the bottom floor will be where the store is.

"The store is important because we'll be able to expand who we're serving because of the money we bring in and we'll also have the clothing drives at the store too," Spade says.

Tyndall says Arizona's Children Association always asks for clothing donations because most of the time, the youth only come in with the clothes on their back.

"If a teenager comes into care, they're going to wear what they want to wear, what's cool and a lot of times, they don't have that opportunity."

Spade says she's trying to combat that with the store. She says they plan to box up clothing by size and hold them in the store, because often homes and the shelters just don't have basic storage space for kids' belongings.

"Most kids just come with a grocery bag, with probably an outfit, maybe two, and some really old shoes," she says. "They don't get anything else."

This is largely the case because of the conditions of the homes the kids come from, Tyndall says. Most youth get removed from their biological parents because of a drug problem, she says.

"The kids aren't going to want to take a lot of their stuff," she says. "They don't know if there are traces of whatever drug there was, on the stuff that they have."

Tyndall also says a lot of times, kids come into foster care because of neglect or some type of abuse. And if that's the case, that means their basic needs - food, shelter, clothing, water - aren't being met.

"CPS and law enforcement's main goal is to get them out of that environment as soon as possible," she says. "They're not worried about getting all of the child's belongings."

Once Life Unfolded opens, it will be offering art, music and sports programs for the participating youth.

Dustin Latimer, the athletic director, is an internationally-known professional rollerblader. He's volunteering to be a part of Life Unfolded and donating his time to helping with sports and all things active.

And Haley Shula, the music director, is a current Arizona State University graduate student studying music. She's volunteering her time as well, often putting in long hours to really help crank out the plans for the programs.

"I had this yearning inside to do great things, and aside from that, helping kids is what I enjoy," Latimer, 28, says.

He also says that he thinks Life Unfolded will eventually turn into something bigger than the group had originally thought.

"By one kid at a time, this will grow into a movement" he says. "Focusing more on each individual and helping them grow in the way they need to let their creativity flourish is an unstoppable force."

Spade says it's more than just that: "We're going to show them how to become something out of what they can do."

Tyndall says this time in a teenager's life is crucial to developing his or her own sense of self.

"With youth in foster care, it's almost harder because they're shuffled around from place to place," she says. "Putting down roots and building identity through the creative process is something the state can't provide because of the budget right now. What Cassandra is doing is wonderful."

Future Plans

Spade says eventually she'd like to branch out into other states with Life Unfolded, but right now, her focus is on Arizona.

And perhaps for a good reason: Tyndall says she recently attended a meeting where she learned that the number of youth in foster care just in Arizona had skyrocketed to 10,500.

What's more is that Arizona "leads the nation in the number of children per capita in group or shelter care," according to Arizonans for Children.

Overall, according to the Florida Department of Children and Families, one in four former foster children is homeless across the United States.

"It's hard," Tyndall says. "I think Arizona has a huge need and there are a lot of children who are in care. Cassandra's on the right track here."

All those involved in Life Unfolded are under the age of 30, something that Spade says wasn't intentional, but something she's using to her benefit.

"They can look to us as role models and mentors instead of authority figures," she says.

This is one of the key factors in the success of such program, says Zaid Gayle, the founder and executive director of Peace4Kids, a similar organization in Los Angeles, which has been in operation for nearly 12 years.

"The most important thing we learned is that foster kids often lack the opportunity to make critical decisions and choices, so that needs to be a critical component when working with [them]," he says.

Gayle also says another important thing to remember is foster youth need to know there are consequences for their actions.

"If you just give youth the opportunity to make decisions, they become much more invested and interested in what you have going on, because the system tends to tell them 'Do this,'" he says. "It's ordered in court documents, and through the lawyer and the foster parents, and it's very rare that they get the opportunity themselves to say 'I want to do this because I choose to do it.'"

Lastly, Gayle says after you give the kids a choice, you give them a voice.

"The voice has to be tied to their definable strengths and their definable creativity," he says. "It's got to be self-fulfilling. Once they begin to trust, 'Okay, in this environment, I get to make choices and be part of a community, so who I am is important,' then they begin to believe that what they say is important as well."

Spade says she looks to Peace4Kids as a distant and ultimate goal she'd like achieve.

"We want to continually expand, we want to go national," she says.

Even though they still have some ground to cover before Life Unfolded can get underway, Spade and her group of fellow dedicated helpers don't pay much attention to obstacles.

"I see big things in our future," she says. "Eventually we'd like to open up a group home, that's where our ultimate goal lies. We'll have all these programs, and eventually be able to get a place where we'll have more kids actually living there."

Spade also says she'd like to open up an art gallery where the youth in foster care can display their pieces for sale.

Following the same theme, the gallery would be called Art Unfolded.

"The gallery will be devoted to the kids," she says. "We'd have accounts for them, and once their work is sold, we could have that money go straight to them once they reach the aging-out stage of foster care."

It's all about giving these kids a second chance, Foxcroft says. She got adopted when she was 11, which she was grateful about because "most people want to adopt babies."

And, all in all, it comes down to the values Spade says she developed as her 9-year-old self.
"I was young and had an open heart, and look where it got me," she says. "It might sound stupid, but I really feel like we can change the whole world by working with foster children, because they're our next generation."

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