IT'S ALL ABOUT
BELONGING
Lynn Price is dedicated to bringing
siblings
in foster care together
By ELLEN GRAY
Photography STEVE GROER
The first things you notice
about Lynn Price are her vitality
and energy. But it’s when
she begins to speak that you
get a sense of her passion, not just in
general terms, but in a highly defined
and profound sense. As the founder of
Camp To Belong, Price has dedicated
her life to reuniting siblings living in
foster care and helping them create
memories that will last a lifetime.
This sibling relationship, which so
many of us take for granted, is the
essence of what Price strives to establish
through her life’s work. Her commitment
grew from her own experience
as a foster child and has taken
root in a way that is both heartwarming
and beautiful.
At the age of 8, Price was living in a
Chicago suburb with parents she
believed were her real mother and
father. She had been raised as an only
child and had no idea she had both a
birth mother and older sister Suddenly,
her world literally turned upside down
when her birth mother emerged and
wanted to reconnect with the daughters
she had lost so many years earlier.
“My real father was a gambler and
ladies’ man who abandoned the family.
My mother suffered a nervous breakdown
and was institutionalized, unable
to care for us. Social Services placed my
sister and me in separate homes, and
we never knew about each other for
several years,” Price says.
So now here she is, living with a wonderful
family, her life full with friends and
school, when out of nowhere along
comes a woman who says she wants her
daughters to be a part of her life. For the
next 10 years, Price resisted overtures
that would help carve relationships with
her mother or sister, keeping this part of
her life a secret out of a profound
embarrassment. She continued to have
supervised visits with her mother and sister,
but always refrained from getting
too close to either one.
“Ultimately, I was never reunited with
my mother, and my foster family never
adopted me. I knew my mother loved
me, but out of loyalty to my foster parents
I just wouldn’t let her in. It was very
confusing, and I didn’t want to be disloyal
to either one,” she recalls.
Eight years ago, Price’s birth mother
died, but not before she finally built a
bridge of understanding with her
younger daughter. Two weeks before
she passed away, she came to Colorado
to visit Price. Her mother had married
her high school prom date and was
happy and settled.
“I was also happy, with three kids,
and my sister had three kids as well,”
Price says. “For the first time, I could
look at my mother, hug her, and say, ‘I
love you,’ and really feel it.” Two weeks
later, her mother died of a brain hemorrhage,
but Price smiles as she reflects
on what was clearly “the most forgiving
time in our whole relationship.”
Her breakthrough with her sister
had come earlier, when, as a junior in
high school, she went to visit her sister
in college. “The first thing my sister
said was, ‘I want to introduce you as
my littler sister.’ My life until then had
been a secret, but she had told everybody
our story. It opened something up
in me, and today, she’s my best friend
in the world,” says Price.
Best friends or not, the one thing
the two sisters could never create are
the wonderful childhood memories
that can come only from growing up in
close proximity to a brother or sister.
Price explains, “When you look at your
life, you realize that living in foster care
is such a small segment of your entire
existence. Typically, even though siblings
are separated in the foster care
system, they still live in the same community, attend the same schools and
have some kind of interaction. My sister
and I missed out on that social interaction
and love that other kids carry
with them into adulthood.”
This void remained with Price, even
as she matured into adulthood. She
worked for a time in the telecommunications
industry, handling national
accounts for programming efforts for
Group W Communications and ESPN.
In 1991, she founded Price and
Associates, a company that provided
sales, marketing and production services
to the telecommunications industry.
In 1994, she sold the business and
moved with her family to Las Vegas,
where she was a fulltime mother to her
three children. However, she still felt
the need to be involved in the community
and soon volunteered as a courtappointed
special advocate (CASA),
overseeing the welfare of kids in the
social services domain.
“Statistics show that as a foster
child myself, I should have been dead,
homeless or in prison. I did not want
these kids to be able to use the system
as a way not to succeed,” she says. “I
did research and discovered that out of
nearly 600,000 kids in the foster care
system, the majority are separated from
at least one sibling. I wanted to work
with those kids and give them something
to build their lives on.”
Although Price felt undeniably
empathetic toward these children, she
was careful not to encourage them to
feel sorry for themselves or to give up: “My approach was to be forwardthinking.
I would tell them, ‘You’re in
this predicament through no fault of
your own, but that said, don’t wallow
in your problems.’” Instead, Price
encouraged these kids to surround
themselves with people who would
offer love and support moving forward.
She explains, “I was not so much hard
on them as I was inspirational. I tried to
give them hope, because I understood
where they were coming from.
“For those of us who have been in
the system, we’re in this constant test
and trust stage. So many of us are used
to being labeled, and people are always
waiting for us to mess up. Then when it
happens, it’s self-fulfilling. Then the
response becomes, ‘Are you going to
stick with me when I mess up, or should
I continue to sabotage my life? I know
you’re not going to want me, so I’ll mess
up and leave on my own terms.’ So now
the mess-up is more of a test.”
Many of these foster children have
huge chips on their shoulders, Price
acknowledges, but that does not mean
they are bad kids. Once a level of trust
can be established, even the toughest
of the tough will cry, the shiest will
become leaders, and they can excel. It’s
just a matter of giving them the leeway
to make the mistakes and accept them.
With three wonderful kids of her
own, Price has learned firsthand just
how strong the sibling bond can be.
Her own children are now 17, 19 and
21, and recently she adopted a 22-yearold
son. “He emancipated from the system
and said that all he wanted was to
be part of a real family,” she says. “He
had been with us in more of a
Disneyland setting but had never lived
at home with us. It was a real test for
him, but it worked out.”
Today, Price’s passion centers on a
culmination of her life’s work and life
experiences. While living in Las Vegas,
she was working at a children’s shelter. “I sat down at a table in an elementary
school, and there was a little girl peering
out at a boy on the other side of
the courtyard,” she recalls. “I asked her
who it was, and she said it was her
brother. I said, ‘Let’s invite him over,’
but she told me the kids were restricted
from spending time together.”
That single moment provided the impetus to create a setting in which
siblings could spend quality time
together without being watched and
judged, a setting in which those precious
life experiences and childhood
memories could be created.
She contacted the Department of
Children and Family Services with the
idea of starting a camp where siblings
in the social services arena could attend
a week-long camp. And so, in 1995,
Camp To Belong was born.
The first year, 32 kids attended the
camp, which was held at the University
of Nevada in Las Vegas. “There was no
pool, so the local fire department would
come and hose the kids down,” she
laughs. Yet the true experiences, while
less obvious, were so much more precious. “After one week’s time, we were
able to give these children permission to
be easy with each other, to have a voice
and to spend quality time together.
These kids were already living apart from
each other, but they could still be part of
each others’ lives,” she says.
In 1997, Price moved her family
back to Denver. Working with the
director of Children and Family Services
in Las Vegas, she brought a group of
kids to Estes Park, Colo., for a oneweek
camp experience. The camp, held
at the YMCA of the Rockies, hosted 80
siblings from Nevada, Colorado and
Wyoming, along with a writer from
Parade magazine, who stayed for the
entire week. The resulting article
helped the camp become a catalyst for
recruitment of staff and kids and the
model for future camps.
Today, the camp has grown to include
venues across the United States and
Canada, and talks are under way to start
similar camps in Australia and England.
Price travels the globe as a guest lecturer
on sibling connections and was
awarded President Clinton’s Points of
Light Service Award in 1998. In 2000,
she was awarded the Oprah Winfrey
Angel Network Use Your Life Award.
Then came the crowning achievement,
when that same year, Camp To Belong
helped in the passage of Colorado
House Bill 1108, which increased
accountability for the child welfare system
with regard to sibling separations
and out-of-home placements.
She has also received Redbook’s 2003
Mothers and Shakers award, CBS morning
show’s American Hero award, and the
L’Eggs Hosiery Women Who Shape Our
World honor. In 2006, her efforts took her
straight to Washington, D.C. “I had a
vision for a National Sibling Connection
Day, and Sen. Salazar co-sponsored a resolution
that went to the U.S. Senate. It
passed unanimously!” she exclaims.
“My life’s work has been so rewarding,
and my own kids have made it
easy,” Price says. “They’ve really grown
up in Camp To Belong and have been
so unselfish when it comes to sharing
me and our home. We’ve had nine different
kids live in our home at different
times, whether they were counselors
who worked with us, recently emancipated
kids or even my own kids’
friends. Our home has always had an
open door, and the kids have always
been fine with that.”
Now, in the next stage of her incredible
journey, Price’s life is taking a different
turn. Her two eldest children are living
away from home, and her youngest
daughter recently signed on with DDO
Artist Agency in Los Angeles. “So now
it’s time for me to spread my wings,” she
says. “We have a new working board,
and we’ve hired a new associate director.
This organization is all about vision, and
while I’ll continue to be the visionary and
the voice behind this project, I’m also
interested in working with other organizations to help them bring a voice to
their visions.”
As part of her work, she plans to
draw heavily from her recently published
book, Real Belonging, Give Siblings Their
Right to Reunite, a biographical look at
her life’s journey and work.
Unfortunately, there are so many
thousands of kids just like Price, who
are deprived of the precious sibling
connections that others take for
granted. Fortunately, there is a
woman, Lynn Price, who will continue
to take the momentous steps that may
one day forever change the way siblings
in foster care are allowed to
bond, live and love.
Cover Credits:
Jacket by Ralph Lauren at Andrisen Morton
Shell at Clotheshorse Boutique
Hair by Sabrina Patterson
Make-up by Elizabeth Kuhn
Aveda Products
Both for Matthew Morris Salon
