Gail: And so in 2015, I met a grandparent in the park. This woman was in the park with a bunch of kids and she sat down. She said to me, “Are you raising your grandchild?” And I looked at her and I thought, well that’s an odd question. And I said, “Yes, but he’s not one of them. He’s at home in trouble.” And she says, “I’m raising mine too.” And that’s when I realized I’m not the only one. And it just seemed like from that moment forward, I would meet them in the grocery store. I would meet them in the park. I started meeting other grandparents that were raising their grandchildren. And I had a calling from God, “You have to do something, and you had to understand. You need to make people aware that this is a problem. You need to support these people.” And so I started randomly foraging and that’s what I met you, Kelly.
Kelly: Gail started this amazing organization that has helped hundreds, and I’m sure you’ve got the numbers. But when you were forming this group Gail, were you finding nationwide and locally with numbers?
Gail: Oh my gosh, yes. There are 2.7 million children that live with grandparents and other relatives or family friends. And we call those grandfamilies, that what we call them.
Kelly: So overall, what do you think there… What are you finding is the biggest challenges for all these families? Is there one particular thing or what are, what are you thinking?
Gail: No. Kelly, I think their age, their ability and physical ability to take care of these kids is hard. About 50% of our grandparents are single grandmothers. And that’s a challenge. The housing is a problem because their ability to live in a single bedroom house is no more possible. Many of our grandparents are raising two children. Some of them raising up to six children. Respite care. They don’t have… Their other children don’t want to support them in raising grandchildren. There isn’t resources in the community all the time for respite care. Legal is a challenge for them, because sometimes they don’t get these children through the foster system, they just get dropped off on their door. They have a legal problem getting custody of the children. Getting adoption. Being able to afford that it’s a real challenge. Many of our grandparents returned to work. And so childcare becomes another expense. You just can’t always make ends meet on social security income. So they had to return to work; about 50% of our grandparents just gone back to work.
Gail: The challenges of the children is a problem. Many of our children have been diagnosed with ADHD, PTSD (post traumatic stress). Trauma, fetal chemical exposure. Trauma itself offers a huge challenge to these children, which makes parenting these children much more of a challenge, and something that we didn’t think about when we took on these kids. We thought, they could just be another kid.
Kelly: Can you talk about what, how much that meant to you when you first met other grandparents, raising grandchildren? What it meant to have that support or what was helpful for you to talk about?
Gail: Yeah. In our support groups, it is so nice to know we’re understood. Kelly, you join all of our support groups and you know, when we get together, it feels so good to know that we don’t have to explain ourselves. We understand each other. The power of our peer support is so amazing because when we don’t know something, somebody else does, when we’re struggling getting through the day, somebody else is there to be there for us. I know that it took me years to feel supported. And now we have a grandmother who came to us and within just two visits to our support group, she came with a smile and she says, I was distraught. And then I met Grand Family Coalition. Yeah. It means everything.