Sam Bracken, himself a former foster child, started Orange Duffel Bag to offer life coaching and other help to teens dealing with the challenges of homelessness or foster care.
For all his subsequent experiences as a ward of the state, Dimitri (not his real name) seems pretty well-adjusted. Tall and friendly, he’s a senior at a suburban Atlanta high school. In not too long, he – like 250,000 other foster kids a year in the US – will be “emancipated” from state care, an 18-year-old left to fend for himself.
Dimitri and his cohort face a daunting statistic: Only 22 former foster care kids graduate from college each year in the US, out of the 2 million people who get their diploma. Equally troubling, 48 percent of aged-out foster care kids become chronically unemployed by age 26.
To avoid becoming part of that statistic, the young Russian expatriate is attending an unusual program inspired by another homeless kid: a former Georgia Tech football standout named Sam Bracken who found his way from a broken home and abusive childhood in Las Vegas – where his role models were “mobsters” and “stoners” – to a successful college football and post-college career.
What no one – even Mr. Bracken’s closest advisers – knew was the extent to which his trademark orange duffel bag was stuffed not just with clothes and books, but with the memories of a chaotic childhood – a time when, Bracken writes, he “thought it was normal for a dad to punch his son square in the face.”
A notably big man still packing much of his football muscle, Bracken published his shocking personal story in 2010 in a book called “My Orange Duffel Bag: A Journey to Radical Change” with the thought of starting an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit group to convey his message of personal transformation to teenagers, especially those who “age out” of foster care every year.
Rather than an up-by-your-bootstraps tale, “My Orange Duffel Bag” is an exploration of personal pain and a paean to determination and dreams – and also to the people who help foster and safeguard those ideals in hard-bitten and often jaded foster and homeless kids.
In four years, 300 students have graduated from the Orange Duffel Bag Initiative’s 12-week after-school program. Operating chiefly around Georgia in the US, the organization has received numerous awards – including the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Service Award. Now it’s in the process of gearing up a national model to address the stubborn post-foster care problem, one that Bracken calls “big, but not so big it can’t be solved.”
