Finding Faithe An’ Hope

By Charisse Smith

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Growing up inside the child welfare system meant learning early that not every authority figure saw me the same way I saw myself.

As a child, I did not yet have the language to describe racism or systemic bias. What I understood instead was a feeling—an invisible distance between the people making decisions and the life they were deciding for me. Most of the caseworkers and supervisors who handled my file were white, and I was a Black girl whose family history was already written down in reports before anyone asked who I really was.

Those reports spoke about poverty.

They spoke about mental health history in my family.

They spoke about risk factors.

What they rarely spoke about was resilience.

They did not write about the strength it takes for a child to navigate foster homes, courtrooms, and constant judgment. They did not write about how poverty can be mistaken for neglect, or how easily a family struggling to survive can be placed under a microscope.

As a young Black mother later in life, I sometimes felt that the system saw my past before it saw my effort. My childhood in foster care followed me like a shadow. When challenges came—financial struggles, raising children without support, trying to build a life without a roadmap—the same institutions that once documented my childhood returned with their own assumptions.

In many ways, it felt like my life had been prewritten in someone else’s narrative.

But the truth of my life is larger than any file.

I was not a statistic.

I was a daughter of a woman who carried trauma the world never helped her heal. I was a mother who loved her children fiercely even while learning how to build a life without guidance. I was a woman navigating poverty, illness, and loss while still believing that something better was possible.

What the system could not measure was faith.

Faith that God still saw me even when institutions did not.

Faith that my life was more than the labels written in reports.

Faith that survival itself could become a form of resistance.

And slowly, through every storm, I began to understand something powerful:

They could document my past,

but they could not define my future.

That future was something I would have to build myself—

step by step,

truth by truth,

hope by hope.