Gina was eagerly awaiting the arrival of her first foster child. After having two biological children, she and her partner were ready to adopt.
“She was supposed to be a perfectly healthy three-month old,” Gina remembered. “But when she arrived, she was only six weeks old.”
And something was very wrong with baby Kennedy.
Kennedy slept nearly all day.
“She didn’t cry for the first eight months,” Gina said. “When her eyes were open, she stared into a corner.”
They discovered that the little girl had been exposed to methamphetamines in the womb.
An assessment revealed that Kennedy was legally blind and her development was severely delayed. The prognosis from doctors was so bad that Gina didn’t think early intervention could help her vision.
“I thought, how are they going to teach a blind kid to see?” recalled Gina.
When Kennedy was four months old, Bertha Preciado started making home visits. Bertha is one of Wayfinder’s specialists who provide early intervention statewide to children with vision loss or multiple disabilities. Among other items, Bertha brought an iPad with a glowing red bunny. Week after week, Bertha would work with Kennedy to follow the slow-moving red bunny with her eyes.
“When I first met her, Kennedy was very nonresponsive to stimulation,” said Bertha. “If she wasn’t being touched, she was unaware of her surroundings.”
To give Kennedy more sensory input, Bertha introduced sand and water. Kennedy loved it.
“It’s amazing how plastic babies’ brains are,” Gina said. “The improvement happened over months, but it was quick. She started seeing.”
When Kennedy was one year old, “Bertha was using the same bunny, but it was bouncing all over the iPad, and Kennedy was following it,” said Gina.
With Bertha, Kennedy’s vision continued to improve, and she made rapid developmental progress. Now age three-and-a-half, Kennedy is in a typical preschool and does not need special education services.
“Early intervention was totally life-changing for Kennedy,” Gina said. “I don’t know where she’d be now without Wayfinder. I didn’t know what to do for her. Thank you to Wayfinder from the bottom of my heart.”
Wayfinder Family Services is a human services agency that provides critical services for children in the child welfare system and children with disabilities.
Founded in 1953 as the Foundation for the Junior Blind, the organization initially provided services to children with vision loss, later adding adults with visual impairment and children with multiple disabilities. To reflect its further evolution, the organization became Wayfinder Family Services in 2018.
Wayfinder’s leadership recognized that a large number of children with medical, mental health or developmental disabilities were in the child welfare system and that children with disabilities were at the highest risk of abuse and neglect. There are currently over 60,000 children in foster care in California. Roughly one-third of children in foster care have disabilities. Responding to this intersectionality, Wayfinder expanded into child welfare services, as well as mental health services to prevent child maltreatment.
Headquartered in Los Angeles, Wayfinder is one of the largest statewide foster care and adoption agencies and provides services to more children who are blind than any other nonprofit in the state. Wayfinder is committed to addressing these complex, intersecting issues to build a better California.
Learn more at wayfinderfamily.org.
Return to 2022 Nonprofit & Corporate Citizenship Awards main events page
