By John Mitchell, LA Times staff writer
There’s a fairy tale of sorts in the story of how a group of girls from a foster care program in Compton blossomed into beautiful debutantes at a Cinderella Ball.
The tale begins with 29 teenage girls and young women who gathered over the course of three weeks last month at the Pepperdine University campus in Malibu. They were there to be schooled in the basics of life, to learn how to confront their worst fears about their childhood and to map their emancipation from the foster care system.
The story climaxes with a ball, a coming-out party for 11 of the older girls, young debutantes who, for one night, dressed in white gowns and waltzed with tuxedoed escorts across the marbled floors of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.
“Cinderella is more than a tale of a girl who lost a shoe and found a prince,” said Kenadie Cobbin, executive director of the HerShe Group, the mentoring and youth development organization behind the camp and ball. “She is the journey of a girl who is treated like an outsider, but dares to follow her dreams, and in the end achieves them. Although the denouement of the story has yet to be written, the beginning is frighteningly familiar.
Almost all of the girls in the program were taken from their families during some crisis and shuffled among relatives, foster families and group homes – from school to school and neighborhood to neighborhood – until, for many, the future seemed as bleak as the past. “The clock strikes 12 when they turn 18, and they are very fearful of what that does,” Cobbin said. “They have to be adults, and they’ve never really had a chance to be children.”
In Los Angeles County, 18-year-olds are not automatically turned out on the street with a token bus fare and a hefty garbage bag in which to pack their belongings. Of the 21,000 foster care children living outside their parent’s homes, the Department of Children and Family Services has placed...
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