December 2022

COC’s Newell Is Building Hope for Others As She Repairs Losses From Her Childhood in Foster Care

By Aldore Collier

Destanie Newell cringes deep down everytime she hears people use the term “foster kids.”

It’s because Newell, a senior regional manager of Color Of Change’s Movement Building Team, spent the majority of her childhood in the foster care system – from age 2 to 17.

She knows firsthand the painful stigma that goes along with being called a “foster child,” she said. She would much rather people use the term “children in the foster care system” if there’s a need to identify them. 

Through her work with Color Of Change, the nation’s online racial justice organization, Newell is taking action with partner organizations and volunteers to bring attention to the foster care system and its overrepresentation of Black children in an effort to make systemic change and empower the young people caught within it.

When Newell was 2, her mother packed up her three kids and left an abusive relationship in Kansas City and headed for Los Angeles. Sadly, Newell said, the abuser followed them to California.

“Almost six months after our arrival, my siblings and I were placed in the system after a domestic violence call for help,” she said. “I’ve often wondered if our initial removal from home was necessary and what resources our family needed instead,” she said. “I would be in this system my entire childhood from that day.”

She thought of her initial family in Los Angeles as “perfect.” The dad, who was Italian, was a  doctor; the mother was a model. 

“We had dogs and kids of every rainbow in the house,” Newell said. “We ate the best Italian dishes and Mama Madeline was the most beautiful woman. She looked like a real-life Black Barbie.”

That utopian existence ended after four years when her grandmother fought adoption attempts and had Newell and her siblings returned to Kansas City.

Life became traumatic, Newell said, noting she was angry at being pulled in different directions. She ended up repeating grades, was labeled “a problem child” and was kicked out of school by the time she was 11.

But by seventh grade, she said, something inexplicably clicked, and despite being bounced around from home to home within her birth family, she began making straight A’s and loving school. Yet because of continuing negative family experiences, she demanded to be sent back to Los Angeles – and foster care – when she was 13.

“My family had a lot of trauma. My parents have both been addicted to crack and cycled in and out of the criminal justice system my whole life,” Newell said. Her mother just returned home in February 2022 from her latest incarceration. There have been periods of no communication with either of her parents, Newell said. Now, however, she said they are working to build back what was lost. 

Foster care meant uncertainty and a lot of people-pleasing, she said, underscoring the need to simply survive.  

“When I hear a child referred to as a ‘foster child,’ I think about the detachment, shame and trauma a kid feels when they are minimized to this label. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wrestled with this label — even today as an adult. The careless way the media and we, as a community, discuss children in care is harmful and it leaves society less inclined to care about those who need the most care.”

Back in Los Angeles, Newell said she wanted so desperately to fit in that she rarely mentioned her background in foster care. 

“I’d omit parts of myself to create a new narrative,” she said. When the fact of her being in foster care was made public, she recalled being “mortified.” She said she was told that she didn’t look or act like a “foster child.”

Her laser focus on academics enabled her to suppress negative feelings and concentrate on graduating and going to college. By high school, Newell was placed in a gifted high school located within the campus of Los Angeles Southwest College, a two-year community college that offered college-level courses to high-achieving high school students.

“I received my associate degree a week before I got my high school diploma,” Newell said. 

She went on to attend the  University of California, Santa Barbara. 

“UC was a struggle, but I made it and it helped make me who I am,” she said.

Now as a 32-year-old married mother of two young daughters, Newell is determined to bring attention to the experiences, needs and issues surrounding  youngsters in the foster care system. 

“I still see the trauma of family separation happening around me and I want to do something about it,” she said. “I want to support the youths just like me to be bigger than a percentage. I just want to answer the questions no one answered for me.”

“I want people to remember children in care are children first and never their circumstances. As a former youth in care, I know I am more than a foster child.”