Our guest on the Soulful Liberation podcast today is the change agent Eric Warner who is featured in the I Am Success Workbook- Youth companion guide to the Black Foster Youth Handbook.
Eric Warner (He/They pronouns) first entered care when he was 8 years old. Through a series of traumatic events and rehabilitation he was able to be reunified with his mother. This, unfortunately, would be an unsuccessful reunion and he would re-engage with the child welfare system at 11. While fighting with feeling validated throughout his youth an unwanted, forceful change prompted Eric with the opportunity to make a change in his life. His personal connection to once being a recipient of services from child welfare allows him a unique perspective when engaging in reformation and change implementation for states and nations. Utilizing, further, his skills in navigating the “aging-out” process and accessing services related to higher-education afford him a wide-set view for the changing and adverse needs related to varying populations that make up the foster care and related fields population.
After transitioning out of foster care, Eric found himself searching for a heightened purpose and familial connection that would come to him in a unique way. The family connection that has helped him become the person who he is today has been made and entered into with a refreshed gaze and enlightened emotional awareness. This is to describe that he has created the family around him, even to the point of reintroducing biological relatives to his meaning of family and what that would mean to re-engage with him. Through this time in his life he refound his passion for and engaged in higher education and seeking his college degree. He has studied at an array of institutions but now attends courses studying Criminal Justice in his pursuit for his B.A.
Eric has had the opportunity to be a public servant for child welfare in varying roles within organizations on a local, state and federal level with each providing more opportunity to enhance his skills and passion for advancing child welfare work and reforming the current structure and ideology of systemic change and implementation. Currently, consultation and collaborative implementation work will allow him the chance to commit his full areas of skill to bring about change needed to promote resilience, self-determination and establish/maintain sufficiency of services and standards for children and young adults in care.
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The Soulful Liberation movement- is all about alchemizing your pain to purpose and power. To explore what freedom, joy, love and the human experience is without the shackles of our past trauma, and generational cultural norms that create harm. It's about being on a journey of holistically healing so that you can go back and support someone else's journey in healing and revolutionizing oppressive systems.
Holistically heal. Be Free. Be You.
