LIAFG in partnership with  YOU GOTTA BELIEVE 

Adoption and Race: Real Talk

Intended audience: Youth/Workers/ Parents: This is a panel in which our youth advocates open a dialogue about the important topics of being a youth in foster care and/or adopted by a person of a different ethnicity and dealing with the challenges that come with being a minority.

Tel: 631-533-LIAS (5427)

Email: suffolkadopt@gmail.com / liasgevents@gmail.com

All members of the panel are part of multi-racial families.

Brieanna Hayes: Brieanna is 22 years old and identifies as a LGBT youth. She has been in foster care since she was 15 years old. Recently, she was granted an Exception to Policy and is still in care waiting for her apartment. Brieanna believes things happen we can’t always control, but we can always learn from them and grow stronger. People describe Brieanna as passionate, funny, thoughtful, artistic and caring. She plans to attend college to study culinary arts and business management. She is working as a chef in training now.

She serves as a member of the YGB Youth Collaborative to help educate prospective permanent parents about what it is like to be a teenager in foster care and how they can best prepare for the responsibility they are about to take on. Her message to adults is “you don’t always have to understand, but you should always be there to support young people the best ways you can.” In this position she also meets with young people in care and helps them to open up to the possibility of having a lifetime family.

Rosie Williams:  Rosie is currently 24 years old. She serves as an Advocate for Youth with You Gotta Believe’s Nobody Ages Out Youth Movement. Rosie entered foster care at 8 months old, and spent the next 20 years placed in more than 30 foster care placements, including foster homes, group homes, residential treatment centers and hospitals. At the age of 19 Rosie meet a woman named Danielle who made a commitment of unconditional love and support to her, and who she calls ‘Mom’. Rosie successfully obtained her GED and believes she was able to focus on that important milestone because of the support, encouragement (and late night tutoring) that she received from Danielle.
Rosie works as an Advocate for Youth and shares her powerful, thoughtful message that family is every youth’s right! Rosie does not want youth in the system to suffer the same losses she experienced while she live in foster care. Rosie is an outstanding, powerful, motivational speaker. Her story touches the hearts and minds of youth, Perspective and current foster adoptive parent and all workers in the child welfare system.

Richard Lefebvre…

Richard Lefebvre was in foster care for almost 10 years, ultimately signing himself out of care. He has lived in multiple different placements between group homes, foster homes, Residential Treatment Centers and Residential Treatment Facilities. To put it in prospective, he attended four different middle schools and six different high schools. He met his mother Danielle when he was turning 17. He had just recently moved back from a placement in Pennsylvania. The funny thing is….. In the beginning he didn’t understand the value of what a family really has. He as naïve and had been burned. He didn’t believe it was possible. That changed with age and throughout he stayed connected to the family. He has decided now, at age 27 to be legally adopted and is currently in the process. He’s here with Nobody Ages Out because he has a strong belief that every child in foster care has a right to a family. No child should age out without a committed support system that they deserve. He wants to make sure future generations don’t ever have to go through what he did.

Nicole Hayward: Nicole Hayward is currently the Training and Support Coordinator for the Long Island Region of You Gotta Believe where she trains and recruits families to become permanent parents to older children in foster care. She believes that all children deserve and need permanent loving families, no matter what their age. She and her husband are the adoptive parents of two children with special needs, who were adopted as older children from the foster card system. Through parenting her children and her association with You Gotta Believe, she has gained much experience in dealing with behavioral, mental health and educational issues. Nicole and her family are members of the AdoptUSKids Speaker’s Bureau and have been featured in Youth Today magazine. She and her daughter were part of the AdoptUSKids 2016 Adoption Month Media Campaign Kick Off. Nicole is also a NYS Certified MAPP/GPS2 Trainer and Mental Health First Aid Certified.