This article first appeared in September 1999.

A small-but-vocal army of emancipated foster youth charged Capitol Hill September 9 to sway senators on legislation designed to ease their transition to adulthood. These able survivors delivered a powerful message: Few 18-year-olds are ready for independence.

Current law cuts off health insurance and services to most foster care youth on their 18th birthday. The Foster Care Independence Act of 1999 would extend a caring network until age 21, giving these teenagers a chance to grow up with a roof over their heads and enough adult supervision to avoid devastating errors.

As 19-year-old Amy Clay from Illinois told senators and their staff, the legislation could prevent "the 30,000 of my peers that age out of the system every year from aging into homelessness, pregnancy and unemployment."

The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed, 380-6, on June 25 a bill providing additional supports for foster youth. Now the Senate is preparing for a vote on companion legislation with the same basic goals: to double federal funding for the Independent Living Program, from $70 million to $140 million annually; to require that states use a portion of those funds for assistance and services to older youths who have not yet reached 21, and to extend Medicaid health benefits to age 21.

Clay, a student at George Washington University, said she came to Capitol Hill to put a human face on foster care statistics.

Sitting there with her blond hair and blue eyes, she relayed, "to my professors, I am an average- or slightly-above-average student with sincere intentions of learning. To my classmates I am just a regular kid who seems to be a little offbeat. To my parents and foster parents I am an issue of pride and at times irritation. To my state I am a success story, a poster child. To myself I am just a 19-year-old. I do the best I can with what I have been given and I try never to forget where I came from or why I started fighting."

I'll never forget," echoed the 23-year-old Percy Bailey, "being told to go out and get my own apartment."

Bailey was only a junior in high school in St. Louis when his case worker informed him that his services would soon be terminated. He enrolled in a Independent Living Program—being taught basic survival skills, like setting priorities, at the same time he was working full-time, graduating high school and serving as vice president of his student council.

Rather than go to college, Bailey opted for the Police Explorer's program, which gave him health insurance and training for a career. Now he's a full-time police officer. As he puts it, unlike many kids in his same predicament, "I didn't fall into the hands of law enforcement. I'm pushing from within."

Three young men from the Baltimore-based Family Advocacy Services, Inc. (FAS) also spoke to the senators, offering insight to a more vulnerable population who require extra services the pending legislation could provide. FAS offers a continuum of community-based educational, clinical and therapeutic placements for emotionally handicapped children and adolescents, including an Independent Living Program for foster youth.

"I know why we're here today," said Ricardo, who admitted to being sexually abused as a young child and eventually causing considerable trouble himself. It took an Independent Living Program, like the one provided by FAS, to straighten him out.

FAS offers a two-tiered program—that would directly benefit from the legislation—for young men between the ages of 17 and 20 to learn to live on their own. The first phase puts the client in the home of independent living sponsors who involve the youth in the daily running of the household. Besides learning how to become part of a healthy, functioning family unit, the youth are given access to employment opportunities. The second phase, which Ricardo has entered, places the maturing client in a supervised apartment. At this point, the youth must be employed, participate in an education program, be drug-free and responsible. When the youth is finally ready for discharge, FAS provides him with a launching grant that matches his savings up to $2,000.

The 22-year-old Sidney graduated from the FAS program with "tools that I'll always carry with me," he said. Now an employee of the state of Maryland, he told the senators that FAS taught him, "what you don't do for yourself, doesn't get done."

George, who has also entered phase two of the Independent Living Program, articulated his own specific needs as a young man with a life-long mental disability. To function normally, George requires medication costing nearly $400 monthly. Once his Medicaid benefits terminate upon emancipation from the foster care system, George may not be able to afford the medicine on the salary he can earn as a landscaper at the Baltimore-Washington International airport.

George's story drew particular attention to one of the most crucial elements of the legislation. Whereas both bills would extend health benefits to independent foster care adolescents, only the Senate bill would stipulate that states must extend Medicaid coverage to youths transitioning out the system as a condition for receiving the higher Independent Living Program funds. Medicaid is a state program funded primarily by federal funds.

Terry Harrak knows what it's like to be harangued by creditors for medical bills she incurred before she even understood that being emancipated from the state system meant losing health benefits. As she views it, she was abandoned twice. First by an abusive father who couldn't even care for her and then by the foster care system.

"At 18," she told the senators, "I was homeless and hopeless."

In Harrak's case, the Residential Youth Services of Alexandria, Virginia interceded and taught the foundering teenager necessary survival skills through its LIFT program-Living Independently for Tomorrow-an apartment-based, independent living service designed to help youth ages 17-21 transition from homelessness or foster care to self-sufficiency.

"We're the strong ones, the survivors," Harrak told senators. Most teenagers released unprepared from the foster care system don't get their lives together enough to function independently, much less venture to Capitol Hill to talk about it.

Jerry Foxhoven, a trial attorney and child advocate, encapsulated the irony of our nation's systems: "We don't let people out of prison without the skills to live independently because we don't want to see them back in the system. Yet these are offenders, not victims."

Foxhoven posed the question, "If we don't do it to criminals, why do we do it to our kids?"