Special Needs Network provides support to families in Los Angeles County affected by wildfires
Felicia Ford's daughter loves to drink tea, which is why the tea set they pulled from the ashes of what used to be their Altadena home is especially meaningful.
"She kept saying, 'I want to go home. I want to go do something. I want to do whatever.'" Ford said. "And I kept telling her that our house burned down in a fire."
Ford is a single mother who had just achieved her dream of homeownership six months before the Eaton Fire erupted in January. It took everything from them but their spirit.
"I can do this because my daughter didn't breathe for 11 minutes at birth, so she has cerebral palsy," she said. "I said, 'I can do a fire.'"
Not only is she the devoted mother of three biological children, but she's also opened her home to foster two other children, one of whom requires additional care like her daughter.
"This experience has been very unique for us, dealing with the tragedy of losing our home. Well, especially for foster kids, you can imagine they didn't have the most stable upbringing, all the time anyway," she said. "Then to find a sense of stability and to find a home and then now have something like this happen."
When asked what the biggest challenge is for her, as the parent of special needs kids, Ford said that it was constantly remaining positive in the face of such an unsure moment.
"It was hard, cause I had to keep telling them it was going to be okay. Even though I didn't know if it was going to be okay or not."
Krystal Williams works with the Special Needs Network Los Angeles. She says that the challenge presented by the fires was made even greater because children with special needs benefit from routine and structure, something that was ripped from their lives by the tragedy.
"These families no long have their home, but the child has lost their routine, their consistency," she said. "That impacts their development, that impacts their therapies and their day-to-day, because that's what they thrive on, that consistency."
Ford says she was heartened to see her special needs community step up in the face of adversity.
"We help each other, and that's who came to my aid," she recalled. "It was not big companies and all this stuff. It was nonprofits, churches, special needs parents, Special Needs Network."
She's not alone in facing the same devastating situation, and the Special Needs Network, a grassroots nonprofit that serves Black and Brown communities dealing with developmental disabilities, once again stepped up to provide much-needed support as far as they could.
"We have started an initiative called 'Adopt the Family,'" said Williams. "Currently, we have 50 families that we are working with and we are helping the families through the process. We are going to be with them from the start until the end. Until they are in their home and comfortable."
She says that a key part of their initiative is focusing on the mental health of those they're helping.
"We have a program called 'Blues,' where we are working with youth who are working through depression and other types of mental health issues," Williams said.
As for Ford, she says that she sets the pace for how her children are dealing with the tragedy.
"I think if they don't see me fall down on the ground and cry and kick and scream, then they didn't do that," she said.
While their time at the Altadena home, nestled in a historically Black neighborhood, may have been shorter than intended, Ford knows that the memories will live on with its legacy, which is not lost on her. Decades ago, she says that Rodney King called the same house home.
"What he stood for represented something to all of us," she said. "It wasn't just a Black thing. It was that it was Rodney King and we witnessed something and people were held accountable and for me, that was refreshing because I'm an advocate by nature."
She says that she draws some parallels between what happened to King and her own story.
"Maybe in light of it being just a challenge, or an obstacle, or something unwarranted," she said. "We didn't ask for this, no one asked for it."
Even through the hardship, she's still finding the silver lining.
"I won't be crying about this in two, three, four years. It's just another experience and it just, it creates this mosaic of what life is and was and will be and that's it."
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