Michael Steven
Foundation
Purpose
To support individuals in poverty with tools, community, legal funds, therapy, mentorship, and medicine to make a home here on Earth and thrive.
About
What does it mean to be held? What is a family?
Those struggling the most in society are the ones without strong family units. Even a child with a family can find themselves alone when their own family is not well enough to see or care for them.
A family builds a foundation of stability with their presence, traditions, unconditional love, and support when things fall apart, no matter what age.
In foster care, often the care ends as soon as the child turns 18. Very few are prepared to take on the world at 18 without any mistakes in their ability to navigate. Life skills are not even taught in school yet they are fundamental for our youth to succeed and for society to evolve into a more compassionate, collective.
Our youth and even adults fall through the cracks while society is built in such a way that life skills are only learned inside of a family. Such as the story of my foster brother, Michael Steven.
At 18, he was let go from his foster care home when he made the choice to come off of copious amounts of medication.
At 21, he was sleeping on the streets and was okay with that. He had so much trauma as a baby and more trauma in his youth that led him to feel it was perfectly normal and okay to find a place in the street to sleep. Michael was hit by vehicle on his bike and passed away in 2015 while living on the streets. He was not upset at his situation but rather very comfortable in it. He did not have the social capacity he needed in order to live well in group homes or otherwise but he did try.
May the youth of our future be provided the tools and support they need to thrive here. May the adult children also find refuge in community, love, and support.
Michael Steven Berkeley was born February 4th, 1993 to Nora Nelson, my mothers sister, who was an addict with a ton of trauma. Nora had just had another son taken away 3 years before Michael was born so my mother frequently stopped by to ensure there was a stable environment with food. My mother was afraid of what she would walk into so I would wait in the car as she would scope things out. At one point my mother found Nora overdosed and Michael on his own with soda in his bottle.
Emergency personnel came to help my aunt and we took Michael in for a short while before child services removed him and put him in foster care. For months my mom fought to care for him and finally 6 months later he was placed back in my mothers care permanently.
Michael was very disassociated with hyperactivity, malnutrition, and delayed learning. With a ton of therapy, love, and support he managed to communicate better but the dissociation stayed with him.
When his oldest sister passed away in 1997 his other siblings all sought refuge to live with family in other states and the entire family frayed at the seams leaving him with our mom and no other siblings.
At the age of 16 my mother was no longer capable of caring for him and he went back into the system until he turned 18.
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