COLUMBUS (WCMH) — A Columbus woman who has been fostering children for almost 40 years is now encouraging others to help with the growing need.
May is National Foster Care Month and Dorcus Potter has taken in almost 500 children over five decades.
“There’s not a week of my life that my kids don’t come back to visit to hang out or just say thank,” foster care parent Dorcus Potter said. “I’m still mom to them. So, it doesn’t matter how old they get, they still come.”
Potter focuses on taking in teenage girls, who can be the hardest to place.
Potter took in Evelynn Stewart at 13-years-old. Stewart had been taken out of her home and was struggling with depression and finding a place she belonged.
“I was able to see some genuine love. She never knew and she probably even doesn’t even know today, but I was at a point where I was ready to take my life because life wasn’t meaningful to me,” Evelynn Stewart said.
Stewart said some of the foster parents she had encountered were abusive. She encourages anyone who is interested in becoming a foster care parent to not do it for a paycheck.
Many of the children in the system have been ripped out of their homes because of neglect or abuse. Stewart said foster parents need to be patient and understand the mental hurdles many children are facing.
“If there is a person there who can love you past all your pain, can love you past all of your failures, can love you past everything you have been through, life becomes meaningful after that,” Stewart said.
Stewart said Potter stepped in and became the mom she never had.
“I can say all of where I am all, all of what I do, is because she loved me when I didn’t feel nobody else loved me,” Stewart said. “It’s interesting to be a foster kid at any age, but to be a foster kid as a teenager, we are often times grasping at straws in our teen years.”
Potter works with the National Youth Advocate Program. NYAP has a new Center for Adolescents and Families on E. Livingston in Columbus.
People interested in becoming a foster parent can go to an open house at 6.pm. on Wednesday, May 11th.