Jynessa Lazzaroni was 9 years old when her mother gave up on parenting and gave up all three of her children to foster care.
Lazzaroni is now a precociously wise and sympathetic woman of 20 who expends little energy dwelling on years of ricocheting from foster home to foster home or sleeping on couches through long, lonely stretches as an adolescent runaway.
She gently describes her mom as “more of free spirit” than someone equipped to feed, clothe, shelter and care for a child, much less three.
“We never did really have a home,” the Santa Rosa-born Lazzaroni recalled. She said that for most of the years she and her brothers did live with their mother in Sonoma County, “we were always staying with somebody else.”
But at least her mother made the attempt, for a time, to parent. Lazzaroni said her father was a perpetual no-show.
If she could turn back the clock and reprogram her childhood, certainly she wouldn't choose again to grow up without even one true parent to care for and watch over her. But she accepts the hand she was dealt and she figures she's doing as well as she is, which is quite well, largely because she looked inward to fill the gaps in her life.
“You learn things really quickly when you have to do things for yourself,” she said.
“Most people say I'm just really adaptable. I find that to be a good characteristic.”
Neither of her brothers has come through the trials of foster care in such good condition as she has: She said her older brother is in prison and the younger is in juvenile hall.
“I think I coped very differently,” she said. “Young men tend to look to violence.”
Lazzaroni is happy, she's employed and has an apartment, and ambitions. She certainly doesn't claim to have survived the vicissitudes of foster care without help.
“I had some good foster families,” she said. And she's deeply grateful to a mentor from Stand by Me, the Sonoma Valley Mentoring Alliance, who went far beyond the call for her.
At 18, Lazzaroni was able to avoid homelessness and take a great, supported step toward self-sufficiency when social workers helped her into an apartment through the Transitional Housing Placement Program. Like many young people released from foster care upon turning 18, she had no money and nobody to help her meet the demands that come with suddenly becoming a legal adult on her own.
Lazzaroni discovered a second family and second home two years ago when she found VOICES — Voice Our Independent Choice for Emancipation Support (voicesyouthcenter.org). It's a street-level program that provides a host of supportive services to young people who've aged out of foster care and too often become homeless, pregnant, drug-addicted or locked up.
VOICES was created in Napa in 2005 by the nonprofit On the Move. The program expanded to Santa Rosa in 2008 with financial help from the Valley of the Moon Children's Foundation, Community Foundation Sonoma County and others.
Recently the Texas-based WHO, or Women Helping Others, Foundation surprised the program with a $25,000 grant that came because VOICES volunteer Barbara Jura made a passionate pitch for it.
Lazzaroni felt an immediate kinship with VOICES and took a job as a part-time program assistant in the program offices on College Avenue in Santa Rosa. The job puts her in daily contact with teens and young adults who are homeless or close to it.
“A lot of them are coming in for food,” she said. Some of the young people are defiant and don't want help to continue their education, develop a trade or tackle the admittedly difficult task of finding a job or a place to live.
“All we can do is to try to meet them where they're at,” Lazzaroni said. Though some of the teens and 20-somethings who find VOICES aren't ready to advance their lives, she finds others are so eager that they need only modest encouragement and perhaps a nudge toward the various available services.
“We have a lot of people come in here and they genuinely want to get their lives together,” she said. She's been in their shoes and she's loving being there to help them take the next step.
As for her future, Lazzaroni has studied for two years at Santa Rosa Junior College and she's drawn to a career in communications — a radio talk-show host, maybe.
She intends to be a parent one day — a foster parent, for the adolescent and teen kids who have such a hard time finding foster parents who'll take them.
“I'll take them,” she said.
Photography by: Christopher Chung
