From Orphan to Advocate
This reflection is shared with permission and represents one youth’s lived experience. Virtue Visionary exists to protect spaces where youth can speak honestly, be seen fully, and engage in advocacy without fear of being minimized or tokenized.
“My journey began in adversity. As a Russian orphan navigating foster care, homelessness, and the juvenile justice system, education often felt impossible. I failed 8th grade twice, never made it to the 10th grade, accumulated 18 juvenile charges, and lived in 12 foster homes within five years. At times, I had nowhere to sleep. Like many foster youth, survival became my focus long before I had the chance to think about a future.
Growing up in the foster care system shaped my identity in painful ways. I did not see myself as a child with potential—I saw myself as a case number. My life often felt like paperwork being passed from one desk to another. Caseworkers would clock in, read my file, make decisions about my future, and then clock out and go home, while I was left living with the emotional weight of those decisions every day. Because foster care was such a high-turnover system, I was constantly being handed off to new workers, new placements, and strangers who only knew me through reports instead of relationships.
Just as I would begin trusting someone, they would leave, forcing me to start over again and explain my trauma to another person trying to piece together my life through paperwork. That cycle created a deep sense of instability and abandonment. It made me feel invisible, as though my life was simply another responsibility being managed within a broken system rather than a child truly being cared for. While workers could separate themselves from the system at the end of the day, I was living in it every moment of my life.
When I emancipated from foster care, I experienced homelessness firsthand and often worked two to three jobs just to survive. Those experiences built resilience, discipline, and determination. Eventually, I realized the same survival instincts and street smarts that once kept me alive could also help me build a better future. I chose to invest in myself and start over.
At nineteen, I earned my GED and began rebuilding my life through education and advocacy. I discovered that my experiences could be used to create change for other young people facing similar struggles.
One of the most transformative opportunities in my life was serving for five years on the board of Lighthouse Youth & Family Services. Sitting alongside community leaders, executives, and policymakers showed me the power of mentorship, representation, and giving youth a seat at the table. That experience later inspired my friend and me to create Opportunities Knocking TLP 501(c)(3), a nonprofit focused on supporting high-risk youth and young adults.
My advocacy eventually led me to speaking at the statehouse and contributing to conversations surrounding housing and support for emancipated foster youth. Those experiences taught me that foster youth are more than statistics—they are individuals with voices, potential, and the ability to become leaders within their communities.
Today, I am living proof of what can happen when one young person is believed in and given opportunity. My journey from orphan to advocate has shown me that investing in youth is not charity—it is an investment in the future of our communities. By creating opportunities, mentorship, and support systems for young people, we give them the chance not only to survive, but to lead".
