Normally this is the space in our newsletter
where we highlight a particular Family Finding Volunteer
that has been working with A Family For Every Child in
The Family Finding Program for awhile. Because we have
so many new volunteers coming on board with us, I
thought this was the perfect format to introduce our
Executive Director: Christy Obie-Barrett. This month, we
will highlight Christy.
Some stay-home moms relish the quit that
blankets a house when the youngest children finally head
off to school. It made Christy Obie-Barrett
itchy.
Seven of her 12 children still lived at home, so
she had no shortage of laundry, grocery shopping,
cooking, cleaning and carpooling. But once twins Delaney
and Lilly Barrett enrolled in kindergarten five years
ago, Obie-Barrett, who was 40, remembers wondering,
"What do I do with myself now?" Write a book about her
enormous, eclectic family? Definitely.
Start a nonprofit? Absolutely.
Improve Oregon's foster-care system?
She'd met big challenges before. But reimagining
that underfunded, overworked, steeped-in bureaucracy
operation into a sleek social machine that swiftly
connects children in need with permanent, loving homes?
That goal was outlandish for lots of reasons, not the
least of which was that Obie-Barrett didn't know much
about foster care. Still, she knew that children abused
or neglected by their parents can face still more trauma
when they're removed from their families and placed in
even the best foster homes. To make matters worse, some
children move repeatedly to different foster homes --
two or three a year, perhaps 20 or more homes during the
course of their youth, always wondering what's next.
"I just could not stand what I was hearing and
seeing," she says, "about children that were raised in
foster care." Plus, Obie-Barrett found the sheer numbers
staggering: Nearly 14,000 Oregon children are in foster
care each year -- on any given day, more than 9,000.
Brian Obie, Eugene's mayor in the late 1980s,
says his precocious daughter, who had just one brother,
planned on a big family from the time she was 5 or 6. "I
didn't think she was serious," he says. Nobody did. But
in 1986, before Christie Obie married Bill Barrett, an
amiable Eugene radio personality who would carve a
career that could feed and clothe a houseful, she says
she was clear about her goal. She wanted 12 children,
some adopted. "Bill's sisters had said, 'She'll have a
couple and won't want any more,'" Obie-Barrett recalls.
Little did they know. She got pregnant right away and
son No. 1, Casey, was born in
1987.
Within months, a relative's 10-year-old boy
joined the family. Jason had been abused and neglected.
His stepfather had killed his mother. He and his sister,
Maleah, needed safe homes. She went temporarily to her
grandparents. He moved in with the Barretts and they
adopted him. Then came Molly, their second biological
child. Jason's 6-year-old sister, Maleah, arrived next,
followed by Mike, a neighbor boy with a difficult home
life; the Barretts never formally adopted him but count
him as one of their children. Mason, the couple's third
biological child, made six.
The couple had been married five
years.
Looking into adoption, she discovered a deep
racial disparity: Five potential families waited to
adopt each available Caucasian child. But for every five
African American children who needed homes, only one
family waited. Obie-Barrett wondered whether it would be
fair to adopt children of color while she and her
husband lived in a city where nearly 90 percent of
residents are white, as they are. She knew they could
love children, regardless of their race. And she knew
that Jason and Maleah, who are Hispanic, had melded
beautifully into the their family and into Eugene.
They charged ahead. In 1993, they adopted
Karson, a handsome African American infant. About nine
months later, when Bill arrived home from a fishing
trip, Christy introduced their newest daughter, Bailey,
also African American. "Then agencies knew we were open
to African American children," Obie-Barrett says. "We
didn't specify gender or race." The couple's phone rang
and rang with calls from hospitals and adoption agencies
looking to place little ones. "I put my foot down,"
Barrett says with faux firmness. "Eight times." Brayden
and Cooper joined the family as babies in 1996 and '97.
And in 1999, so did 1-week-old twins, Delaney and Lilly.
Watch her run a meeting at her nonprofit, A
Family for Every Child, and if it weren't for the jeans
and bare feet, you'd think she was a seasoned corporate
executive. Organized, focused and decisive, Obie-Barrett
appears to possess key skills needed to lead a rapidly
growing organization ... or a 14-person household; at
one point, hers included six children under age 5.
At its peak, her family went through 16 gallons
of milk each week. They still fill two freezers and
three refrigerators with such supplies as 18-packs of
eggs, gallon bags of cheese and mayonnaise jars as big
as a man's head. Commercial-size frying pans and
stockpots hang from a rack in the kitchen, where
color-coded calendars list not only every family
member's schedule of ballgames, school talent shows,
dentist appointments and the like, but also each child's
day-by-day chores: dust entry, clean room, mop floor and
more.
The 5,000-square-foot, three-story Barrett
house, with its eight bedrooms and two baths, has seldom
quieted in the 20 years the family's lived there. But
when those twins shoved off to kindergarten, their
multi-tasking mom whose energy seldom flags considered
changes of her own.
Although she hasn't found time to publish the
book she planned, she wrote her family's stories, from
the big stuff -- her children growing up colorblind, or
at least with their own definitions of race and color --
to the smaller moments that fill their collective lore.
The time, for instance, a pet mouse was sucked into the
vacuum cleaner and survived, and the tale of losing a
toddler in Denver's airport. Security found the boy
happily sliding on his belly at the end of a concourse,
and the entire platoon of Barretts trooped onto their
flight just before the jet's door closed.
Obie-Barrett read, too. Researching foster care,
she learned that caseworkers tag some children
"unadoptable" because of their age, race, disabilities
or because they're part of sibling groups. That tag
"just kills me," she says. "It's just a matter of
finding the right family." She bought one of those "For
Dummies" books about how to start a nonprofit and in
January 2006 incorporated A Family for Every Child,
aiming to help find permanent homes for the state's most
hard-to-place kids. On TV, she caught a "20/20" feature
on a New Mexico social worker who founded Heart Gallery
of America, a traveling photo exhibit of children
available for adoption but living in foster care. The
sweet images, hung in shopping malls, airports,
supermarkets and such, have lured potential parents and
resulted in hundreds of adoptions. "I said, 'I want to
do this,'" Obie-Barrett recalls.
Not all child-welfare workers agree that
publicizing children in gallery-like fashion is wise,
typically for reasons of privacy and safety. But in Lane
County, she found workers with Oregon's Department of
Human Services, which administers the state's
foster-care system, willing to give it a try. She staged
her first Heart Gallery exhibit in November 2006,
opening with 44 children's portraits at Eugene's Fifth
Street Public Market. Her nonprofit was up and running.
A sliver of a woman with a cascade of red hair
and a no-nonsense attitude, Obie-Barrett sits on a
donated chair at the head of a donated conference table
in the donated office space on Eugene's west side, where
she and her staff of 10 work. Their offices are bright,
spacious and cold. The one month they turned on the heat
the bill was $900 -- money better spent, they decided,
on connecting children in foster care with permanent,
nurturing families. So now, Obie-Barrett's bare feet
aside, she and the others simply bundle up.
As a staff meeting gets under way, she holds up
photos of two little blondes with angel faces, victims
in a national child pornography ring.
The horrid news fails to shock the nonprofit's
staffers. Frequently the children they seek to help come
with deep psychological or physical scars. Some were
born to drug- or alcohol-addicted mothers. Others live
with autism, Down syndrome or severe behavioral
challenges. Too often, such children are not selected
when parents decide which boy or girl to adopt. Those
children most urgently in need of families, mentors and
advocates are the ones A Family for Every Child aims to
help. Operating on donations, grants and a state
contract -- Obie-Barrett takes no salary -- the
organization has worked with more than 400 children and
has 400 more in its current caseload.
In three years, the nonprofit has blossomed
beyond the photo exhibits. It enlists 25 volunteers,
always recruiting more, to mine case files and track
down dozens of members of a foster child's family, or
those such as teachers, neighbors or Scout leaders who
may once have been close to them. Ideally, the people
found commit to support the child as they can, from
offering as much as a home to as little as periodic
phone calls and birthday cards.
State case workers routinely search for family
members, too, but high turnover and caseloads of 30 or
40 children apiece limit how much they can do, says
Carla Crane, child-welfare program manager with DHS in
Lane County. Obie-Barrett's volunteers serve as
caseworkers' teammates, delving deeper than the workers'
time allows. When those in other counties ask Crane how
they might institute such a volunteer program, she says
she replies, "You find somebody like Christy, who is
just amazing. ... she's got more energy than anybody I
know."
A Family for Every Child also pairs volunteer
mentors with foster youths 12 and older. Some strive to
motivate the young people to graduate from high school,
enroll in college or find stable jobs and housing once
they "age out" of foster care at 18. Others grow to know
and love the children they mentor and adopt them.
Angella Wilger mentors a 13-year-old whose
photograph she first spotted in a Heart Gallery exhibit
at Eugene's airport. She didn't know the girl had been
terribly abused, but something about her expression
grabbed Wilger's heart. They meet about once a week and
"when she's with me," Wilger says, "she's an angel all
the time."
Wilger's something of an angel herself. Once
involved as a mentor, she joined A Family for Every
Child's board of directors and works, essentially, as
the nonprofit's chief operating officer. Among other
tasks, the former tech executive streamlines systems so
the organization's new Heart Gallery Adoption Agency can
help swiftly move children out of foster care and into
adoptive homes.
On a rare spring Sunday when the thermometer
teases toward 80, Obie-Barrett sips ice water on the
lawn outside her family's hilltop home. The place was a
wreck when they bought it 20 years ago, but as her
husband's career in radio and voice work for such
clients as McDonald's and Microsoft flourished, they
renovated, adding on as the family grew.
All but one of their dozen children, plus
spouses, girlfriends and grandchildren, trickle in for a
barbecue celebrating the three family birthdays in
April. May holds three more and the rest stack up
through July, the end of "birthday season," as the
family calls it. As one child climbs a tree others whiz
past on skateboards. Some shoot hoops. Others take turns
on a trampoline. Swings, a slide and even ziplines stand
waiting.
Weekdays feel far less free-form. Barrett,
co-host of the KKNU (93.1 FM) morning show, heads to
work long before sunrise; afternoons, he carpools,
grocery shops and rustles up dinner.
Obie-Barrett delivers kids to four different
schools before arriving at her office around 8 or 8:30
a.m.; she's home by 5 p.m. or so, but typically works
late into the night. The BlackBerry clipped to her
shorts, even on a day off, hints at the urgency she
feels to find homes for children in foster care.
Evidence that the work pays off fills her
e-mail. A recent note from a new adoptive mother, who
took in six small children: "We have the four oldest
home and it's WONDERFUL! They are perfect. The youngest
two will come as soon as the 2-year-old is healthy. ...
I'm loving every minute of this. It's like we were all
made just to be together and be a family. I'm SO in
love!"
Obie-Barrett feels that way about the work she's
made for herself, too -- about the realization that
"normal people can change things."
"Lunch is ready! Lunch is ready! Lunch is
ready!"
Delaney, one of the twins, chants her
announcement from the front stoop.
Inside, enough hamburgers, hot dogs, macaroni
salad, strawberries and grape Jell-O to feed a
neighborhood spreads the length of a farm table. Kids
with full plates perch on a nearby couch, next to the
stone fireplace, on the floor or across the back porch,
near the pool.
Chatter and laughter run steady, until chocolate
birthday cake is served and, for a few rare minutes at
the Barrett house, quiet
rules.
