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“This is a story about me and my hurts. Everyone has hurts, even some of the people reading this booklet right now. … If we talk about our hurts, it can sometimes make us feel better.” — Heather’s Hurts
“Kids don’t believe all the stuff I’m doing,” Heather says. Through her foster care advocacy, she’s rubbed elbows with Dakota Fanning and Peyton Manning. She’s danced with Jerry Rice (his hand is as big as her back). She’s shared her story on Dick Gordon’s National Public Radio program, “The Story.” “She’s a powerful spokesperson, considering her horrendous experience,” says First Star Executive Director Elisa Garr, who has shared Heather’s booklets with others who work in the child welfare field. “I think that they’re very helpful because they’re right from her, from her experience, but they’re simplistic enough so that a child can understand them.”
The girl beneath the words
“Memories for me begin about the age of four. I don’t remember things like toys, friends, books or birthday parties. I do remember things like funny smells, piles of clothes, lots of strange acting loud adults, lots of sleeping adults who looked dead, being hurt a lot, watching movies of scary and nasty things, and being locked up in a room that had an alarm.”
Last fall, 17-year-old Heather Wilder gave a presentation at the TEDx Youth Social Entrepreneurship conference at Sidwell Friends School in Washington D.C., the ritzy private school Barack Obama’s daughters attend. She was one of only eight young adults around the world to speak at the event, and the only one from Las Vegas. All of them talked about their projects designed to help other people. Wilder didn’t just talk about her years of helping foster kids in Las Vegas — kids who spend most of their childhood being passed around from house to house, she said, “like a cardboard box.” She also talked about being a foster kid. She talked about suffering years of abuse at the hands of a drugged-out mother. She talked about the social workers and caseworkers who wrote her off as “emotionally disturbed and most likely not going to succeed in anything.” Through it all, she spoke with a grace and maturity that belied her difficult past. To kids at Cimarron High School, here in Las Vegas, Heather Wilder is that strange girl, that “geeky nerd special ed kid who knows nothing,” she says. But to other foster kids, she’s an inspiration and a role model — an author whose numerous booklets and chapbooks about life in the foster system give them hope. “If I had a dream or something came up I was having trouble with, I would write it down and feel better,” Heather explains. “It was kind of therapy for me.” The books have opened up a whole new world of possibility, shaping a vision of her life that is bigger and more generous. She’s since run toy drives and scrapbook workshops. She works with First Star, a national nonprofit agency that fights child abuse. To see her walking the grounds of Lummis Elementary, where her adopted mother Tammy Wilder teaches, is to see a young woman loved by all, from staff to elementary kids.
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— Growing Up with an Addicted Parent
Spokesperson? Not bad for a teenager who, according to the statistics on foster children, should be pregnant or on drugs or in jail. There are about 3,200 kids in foster care in Clark County in any given year. Most cycle in and out of the system. But there are roughly 70 kids a year who “age out” — who turn 18 and are still in the foster system. At that point, they are, of course, legally adults, but many of them are woefully unprepared for life. These kids often don’t have driver’s licenses or high school diplomas. They lack job training and a support network of family or friends. “Unfortunately, many turn to illegal activities to support themselves. Well over half are homeless in the first year they leave care,” says Ellen Lloyd, executive director of Child Focus, a nonprofit childcare agency. “About half the inmate population in Southern Nevada is former foster care.” “On average, they don’t fare very well,” says Mark Courtney, professor of social service administration at the University of Chicago. “They’re much less likely than other young people their age to graduate from high school, go to college, be employed. They’re much more likely to have run-ins with criminal justice, to be arrested, to be incarcerated. Young women are much more likely to become pregnant.” Heather herself still bears the scars of her upbringing, scars visible and invisible. The signs are there, beneath the poise and polish. Heather’s short-term memory is not great; her awareness of dates is a bit fuzzy. But the broad and sad outline is clear enough. For years, her mother and a string of boyfriends abused her. They kept her locked in a room all day. They fed her once a day, a bowl of ramen noodles. She had no toys. No TV. They pulled her out of school. She had one toilet, which overflowed. She was sexually abused. When