Raise The Future works with counties to improve the lives of youth living in foster care

Raise the Future works to find caring adults who will support children who can't rely on their own family. Raise the Future also provides support services to families who are struggling with trauma triggers. In both scenarios, Raise the Future works directly with counties across the state. One county in particular is finding new ways to improve the system for children.

"Homes for Hope, that's my baby," said Charles "Chaz" Tedesco, an Adams County Commissioner since 2013.

Tedesco was a driving force behind Homes for Hope, a program that provides emergency housing for children who need a place to be safe. In 2018, the county renovated two county-owned houses. They're run by certified foster parents, and have plenty of toys, and clothes, and food for the youth who need to be removed from their homes.

"There should be programming to keep them in their schools, to keep them with their friends, so that people don't think that they're any different," Tedesco explained.

Homes for Hope limits a child's stay to 90-days.

"That allows time for the caseworker to either clear the parents for reunification with the parents, or clear the foster families if not," Tedesco said.

Homes for Hope is one of several initiatives that Tedesco has spearheaded. He supported an effort called The Caraway House, which converted Adams County's old child services building into housing, and then dedicated 14 of the units for teens who are aging out of the system. He advocated that the new human services center have an apartment like setting where a caseworker can stay with a child in an emergency situation. He served on the Former Foster Care Youth Steering Committee at the State Capitol, which worked out the logistics of extending benefits to teens who faced being on their own at age 18. Now those youth can apply to stay in foster care until they're 21-years-old. Tedesco even has an award named after him. Foster Source, which is an agency that helps foster parents, gives out an award called the Charles "Chaz" Tedesco Champion Award. It goes to anyone who goes above-and-beyond the normal in advocating for foster families.  Tedesco, himself, was the first recipient of the award.

"I'm very proud of that one," Tedesco told CBS News Colorado. "This work is about the kids. It's not about the service, not about the adults, not about anything other than the kids. They need our help."

Tedesco was a driving force behind a bill at the state legislature that cleared the way for teens living in foster care to get their driver's license. That was a right-of-passage that teens in foster care previously missed out on because of liability issues if they got into an accident.

"When we talk about kids in foster care, we think that the state is going to provide everything, and they really don't. There's a lot of things that kind of fall through the cracks, and one of them is driver's licenses," he explained.

Tedesco is motivated to fill the crack in foster care, because he lived in the system for the first five years of his life. He was adopted at age five, and said that he felt loved, he felt that somebody cared about me, and he felt comfortable in the environment he was in. While he doesn't remember the time he was in care, he said that many of his extended family members were not as accepting of him.

"I think that drove me to try to provide the best atmosphere as I can for kids who going through this," he said.

He welcomes all the help he can get in his mission.

"Raise the Future is an important asset. They enhance what we can do as a county," Tedesco said.

Raise the Future's mission is to find permanency for youth in foster care, and then wrap those families in services that help them succeed.

"We work with kinship families [and foster families] in Adams County. We provide the TBRI classes. We provide the in-home coaching , and then we also provide the therapeutic case management, that is family navigation," said Brooks Kaskela, Director of Family Support Services for Raise the Future.

TBRI stands for Trust Based Relational Interventions which is a set of principles that help parents handle children who have suffered trauma. Raise the Future is an ambassador 

"They have been tremendous over the years in helping us find family members and connections for the kids that are so hard to place," Tedesco explained.

LINK: Donate to A Day for Wednesday's Child

You can support the important work of Raise the Future by making a donation during CBS Colorado's A Day for Wednesday's Child. The money raised is used to pay for important support programming, for Youth Connections Advocates to work with the youth, and to keep the lights on every day.