An estimated 4.2 Million children experience homelessness in the United States. Of those children, 50% were in foster care at some point in their lives. David Ambroz has a plan to shrink those numbers. Having spent his childhood homeless, bouncing from the care of a mentally ill mother to various foster homes where he suffered abuse and other forms of violence, he had a front row seat to a very broken system. Now, as a national child poverty expert and advocate, Ambroz is advocating for reform around an often-ignored issue.
Last year, Ambroz became a best selling author when he published his memoir, A Place Called Home, which Hillary Clinton described as, “A rousing call to make this a more humane and compassionate nation.” He was also recognized by President Obama as an American Champion of Change.
These impressive accolades are no surprise to those familiar with Ambroz’s work. Once people read his book or listen to him speak, they tend to experience a burst of motivation to join him in his effort to completely overhaul what he believes is a very fixable system. Despite all he’s been through, Ambroz still believes in the capacity for human kindness. Front and center in his mission to reform child poverty is the drive to, “rekindle the belief we’ve lost – our belief in each other. It’s possible. It’s an amazing thing. And we need it back.”
Ambroz’s plans to reform the child welfare system starts by getting the American public to understand the economic opportunity available in an untapped workforce. By creating job pathways for children who graduate from the foster system and creating more work-friendly policies for parents who choose to foster, the U.S could open up an entirely new workforce while decreasing homelessness.
“Every year, 700,000 kids pass through foster care,” Ambroz says. “That’s a lot of people available to join the workforce. Plus, you’re looking at a population with incredible resilience. What if instead of emancipating foster kids at 18 and leaving them to live on the streets, you gave them a job? What if instead of pitying foster kids you started hiring them?”
It makes economic sense, he points out, since taxpayer dollars go towards caring for these children in some form.
“50% of homeless children in the United States were in foster care,” he says. “Guess who’s paying those taxes? When you don’t take care of the community, you’re going to end up paying for it one way or the other.”
“We look at this as a charitable thing,” Ambroz says. “But it’s the moral and economically sensible thing to do. It’s a bottom line issue.”
Generally, children who graduate from foster care at the age of 18 are forced to rely on public resources, which can perpetuate the cycle of poverty for generations.
“You could make each of those 700,000 kids truly successful if you improved the system,” he says. “You have social workers, foster parents, biological parents, courts. We need thousands of foster parents, not millions. That’s not unattainable.”
Ambroz has been working in public policy for years. While still in school, he created the National Foster Youth Advisory Council, which enlists input from young people who have been through foster care to inform child welfare policy. He also co-founded a program called FosterMore, which “provides opportunities for the public to engage and improve outcomes for youth in foster care.”
Ambroz also sees a massive opportunity to incentivize more families to become foster families.
“Organizations can be more foster friendly,” he says. “We will not solve this with charity or public policy alone. We need the private sector.”
There’s currently no federal parental leave for foster parents. But for companies, Ambroz points out that expanding parental benefits to include fostering would attract even more employees in a competitive marketplace.
“People always ask, ‘don’t people just foster kids for the money?’ There are a lot of reasons, and many are economic,” Ambroz explains. “Foster care is a vehicle to address childhood poverty. And the largest segment of our society is the middle class. There are so many ways to entice the middle class to foster.”
“What if after ten years of good foster service their biological kids could go to college for free? What if we gave them a pension, healthcare benefits, loan forgiveness?,” he suggests. “Those who do choose to foster are fighting a war on poverty, so why don’t we reward them as the heroes they are?”
These endless “what ifs” are what motivated Ambroz to publish his memoir last year. He realized he wasn’t using all the tools he had to really inspire change.
“I was so frustrated with policy,” he says. “But the way we change hearts and minds is through storytelling. I wasn’t using my own personal story to open people’s hearts and minds and showing them the opportunity we have. Not addressing child poverty is a choice. We don’t have to have it. So it was all rooted in this drive to get the public to care about this issue.”
“There’s 8.4 million kids in poverty,” he says. “Yet we haven’t talked about poverty at a presidential debate since 1999.”
Those who have read the book may be asking the same question I asked Ambroz as soon as I finished reading it. How was he able to re-examine the most difficult parts of his life and put them into these words? How could he possibly still be optimistic after all that’s happened to him?
To which Ambroz replied, “I originally took the physical violence and public apathy, and I organized them on a shelf. That is what allowed me to be successful on paper.”
His “on paper” success refers to the various roles Ambroz has held at major corporations, both as the executive director of corporate social responsibility at Disney and in his current role as Amazon’s head of external affairs and community engagement. This success is proof of what he preaches – that it is possible for children who graduate from the foster care system to have fulfilling, impactful careers that enable them to contribute meaningfully to the economy.
Ambroz, who is now a foster parent himself, says it was his own foster son that asked about his childhood, prompting the exploration into his past in more depth. Ambroz says that by writing the memoir, he was finally able to take his pain “off that shelf.”
“Eventually, I got to a certain age where I felt emotionally healed and safe enough to tell my story,” he says. “We are taught to suppress emotion, especially as men. We’re told to stop crying, to not be sad, to get through it. I used storytelling as a healing process and fully embraced every moment of it.”
Ambroz acknowledges that his own decision to become a foster parent should not dictate that everyone who graduates from the system should follow suit. “I always tell kids they don’t have to come back to the system,” he says. “They don’t owe it to everyone else to become a social worker. They don’t have to become foster parents. It makes no more sense for a foster kid to become a foster parent than it does for anyone else to become a foster parent.”
Ambroz also advocates on behalf of the queer community in foster care. He personally came out as queer during his early days of working in DC in the early 2000’s, which was not an easy time to do so. He says he came out as a way to advance policy change. At the time, Ambroz was working with The Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) and the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund in 2002 to create a joint initiative to support LGBTQ youth and adults.
“We were trying to change ‘best practices’ for queer kids in foster care,” he says. “Those ‘best practices’ at the time were all about ‘treating’ queerness, not affirming it. I’m proud to have been a part of that.”
Ambroz has always seen the potential of children who have experienced homelessness, foster care, abuse and more. That’s why he has made it his life’s work to advocate for and focus on what he sees as the endless opportunities for children emerging from that system.
“Foster kids don’t know about engineering, social corporate responsibility, marketing,” he points out. “Let’s direct them there. Let’s get them out of the system however we can so they can reach their full potential.”
“We need to reinvent the American spirit,” he says. “We need to reinvest in the government and hold it accountable. Government isn’t some separate entity. It’s us. It’s businesses, it’s individuals. Most people fetishize the Supreme Court but can’t name a single local judge. Who is the head of your school board? Who is your local assembly person? What if everyone put aside an hour a month for civic engagement? What if we all stopped and said, ‘What can I do?’”
“Why don’t we look at this as an awakening?” he asks. “Why don’t we stop making fun of the system and start doing something about it?”
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