Gala honors legacy of foster care heroes

Dan Devine

For over 35 years, Rev. Richard W. Richardson and Mrs. Jestina Richardson have dedicated their lives to helping children in foster care. Next Saturday, those efforts will be celebrated, and the Richardsons hope it will inspire the community to give.

On Sept. 30, Children’s Services of Roxbury Inc. (CSR) will present a gala tribute to the Richardsons entitled “Building on the Legacy.” Held at the Boston Marriott at Copley Place, the event will honor the Richardsons’ careers and begin a fundraising campaign to generate a $1 million endowment for CSR, the region’s largest minority-administered agency.

Both the celebration and its financial ambition demonstrate how far the Richardsons’ mission has come since its humble beginnings in the basement of their Tewksbury home in the early 1970s.

Back then, the Richardsons weren’t administrators. They were foster parents who had spent 25 years of experience working the state’s Department of Social Services (DSS). In those 25 years, they hosted more than 50 children, but they felt compelled to do more.

“We just started because we saw a need,” said Mrs. Richardson. “We felt at that point that maybe kids weren’t getting the best of attention — not that people weren’t trying to provide it, but that maybe they didn’t quite know how.”

In 1972, they brought together a group of foster parents from neighboring towns and created United Homes for Children (UHC) to show kids in the foster care system a different way of life beyond the city.

While the organization grew over the years, the Richardsons found that many UHC charges seemed to chafe at their new suburban surroundings and ran back to their familiar city lives. When DSS would find the runaways and ask the Richardsons to take them back, they always did.

“We asked, ‘Don’t you like it here?’ They’d say yes. ‘Is something wrong?’ They’d say no. Then we’d ask why they had left. They’d tell us, ‘Because all this is yours. Mine is back in Dorchester,’ or Roxbury, where they were from.”

That powerful message made the Richardsons realize that to help urban kids, they had to get into the urban neighborhoods. They began developing ties in Roxbury and Dorchester.

In 1990, when financial difficulties threatened to close the private foster care agency Roxbury Children’s Service, then-DSS Commissioner Marie A. “Sandy” Matava called the Reverend.

He had plenty on his plate already between UHC and his ministerial duties at St. Paul A.M.E. Church in Cambridge. But this was about kids.

“My goal was to spend one or two years with them and go back to United Homes for Children,” Rev. Richardson said.

That didn’t happen. He served as the president and CEO of the agency, renamed Children’s Services of Roxbury, from 1990-2006. Over those sixteen years, the organization became an expansive umbrella under which children and families could find shelter.

While her husband focused on CSR, Mrs. Richardson became executive director of UHC, which moved to Dorchester in 1995. She created residential programs for young boys and girls in Merrimack and Dorchester, and when she learned that a large part of UHC’s youth population wound up homeless after aging out of the organization’s services, she developed an extensive shelter program offering both short-term help and continuing assistance.

Last July, the Richardsons merged United Homes for Children into Children’s Services of Roxbury, making CSR the largest child welfare agency controlled and operated by African Americans, with a fiscal year 2007 budget of roughly $15.6 million. It also made the organization one of the area’s major employers, with 85 percent of CSR’s employees coming from the communities they serve.

“We see our clients on weekends, in church, in shopping centers, in the parks. Our social workers give our clients their phone numbers,” he said. “You have a problem, call me. … That’s the difference that Children’s Services of Roxbury has brought to the child service welfare system.”

Another difference is its array of services, ranging from family day care and supervised visitation sessions to “scattered site” housing — in which the state contracts organizations to rent and furnish apartments for people without permanent residences, giving them a place to live while they receive help to secure their own homes — and the Youth & Police in Partnership program, in which kids work with peers and Boston Police Department officers to increase trust between the two groups.

The merger left the Richardsons one step away from retirement. All that remained was finding someone to lead Children’s Services of Roxbury into the future.

Pamela Ogletree first met the Richardsons at St. Paul A.M.E. She built a relationship with them, joining CSR’s board about two years ago and volunteering in its teen parent mentoring program. But when they asked her to succeed them? That caught her off-guard.

“It was completely unexpected,” Ogletree said. “[But] Mrs. Richardson [said] she felt like the position needed someone with the right spirit, and that was more important to her than credentials and experience.”

Not that Ogletree’s credentials aren’t impeccable — her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Stanford University, her MBA from Simmons College Graduate School of Management, and her experience co-founding Cambridge’s Benjamin Banneker Charter Public School and working with the educational nonprofit BELL Foundation prove that. But she admits the crossover to social work seemed daunting.

“When the Richardsons approached me, that was one of the things that made me feel uncertain about taking on the role,” Ogletree said. “But I had a passion for children, a passion for trying to do something that would help to make our communities better, and so this to me … was an extension of the things that I cared about.”

In other words, she was perfect. Ogletree accepted, and in January, took over the organization Rev. Richardson started 16 years earlier.

“[Pamela] brings compassion for children and families,” said Mrs. Richardson. “We’re excited about her leadership and [know] that she’ll take it to another level.”

Ogletree has rewarded the Richardsons’ faith by developing a plan on how to get there, emphasizing integrating CSR’s services and taking advantage of the new opportunities afforded by the merger.

“We are just now understanding what [we] can really do,” Ogletree said. “You had two agencies coming together that had operated very separately, with all of these wonderful programs in both, but we weren’t drawing on the resources, the talents, the gifts within those individual programs. The more that we can draw upon the resources that are already within the agency, it’s going to be powerful. … I want us to set our standards high, and I want us to strive to reach them.”

The organization certainly set a lofty mark with its new fundraising campaign. The Richardsons have always dreamed of leaving CSR with an endowment, which would enable the agency to rely less on state funding.

“We live off the contracts we get from the state, but we don’t have the strength of most of the majority agencies to do as many programs as we’d like to,” said Rev. Richardson.

“We would like to be able to work with people before they come into state systems like DSS or the Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA), which oftentimes is not the best experience,” Ogletree said.

In discussing the endowment’s potential for both CSR and its clients, the Richardsons and Ogletree stressed the importance of self-reliance, breaking the cycle of dependence and despair many clients feel when they can’t seem to support themselves.

The Richardsons plan to develop an institute that will help people do just that. So much for retirement.

While details are still sketchy, the Richardsons say it will be a primarily academic initiative focusing on compassion and instruction.

“My role is to shut the front door of the DSS system and the Department of Youth Services system,” Rev. Richardson said. “Once [families] get into the system, they lose control of their lives. Someone is always scaring them that if they do the wrong thing, they won’t get their kids back. It’s demanding instead of educating.”

Ogletree said CSR will be a major supporter of this initiative, which she believes can get off the ground in the near future.

“It may start with just one or two programs or classes and build from that, [and] it might take a period of five years before it’s something that’s really an institute,” Ogletree said. “I’d say that we would be able to do something within the next, say, six months in terms of beginning to lay the groundwork for the components of the institute. [But] building institutions takes time.”

Thankfully, there’s already a solid foundation in place.

“Every organization has a culture, [and] the culture of ours is one of respect and dignity. It runs through everything we do,” Rev. Richardson said.

More than anything, those values are the Richardsons’ legacy.

“We just don’t do [things] the regular way, and that’s why we’ve been successful,” Rev. Richardson said. “The job that we have done is one of compassion, one of respect, and we feel that that will outlive our names for a long, long time.”