Overcoming Adversity & Thriving Against All Odds with David Ambroz

2022-09-15

ATTENTION: This episode touches on sensitive topics such as poverty, homelessness, parental mental illness and foster care. Listener discretion is advised. For my guest David and his two siblings, their mother’s paranoid schizophrenia brought with it poverty, violence, and instability. They traveled through New York and neighboring areas seeking shelter: they found it in train stations, 24-hour diners, anywhere warm and dry. The first 11 years of his life he was homeless, then he was placed in foster care. At first, it felt like salvation but soon proved to...

ATTENTION: This episode touches on sensitive topics such as poverty, homelessness, parental mental illness and foster care. Listener discretion is advised.

For my guest David and his two siblings, their mother’s paranoid schizophrenia brought with it poverty, violence, and instability. They traveled through New York and neighboring areas seeking shelter: they found it in train stations, 24-hour diners, anywhere warm and dry. The first 11 years of his life he was homeless, then he was placed in foster care. At first, it felt like salvation but soon proved to be just as unsafe for him.

As a gay child, David’s coming-off age is fusrther marked by anti-gay abuse at the hands of caregiovers and therpists.

David Ambroz is a national poverty and child welfare expert and advocate. He was recognized by President Obama as an American Champion of Change. He currently serves as the Head of Community Engagement (West) for Amazon, coordinating with non-profits and community leaders for social good. Previously he led Corporate Social Responsibility for Walt Disney Television, and served as the President of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, and as a California Child Welfare Councilmember.

SOME KEY POINTS

What is home? Where is home?
What people get right and get wrong about childhood poverty
How to create ground-up change in foster care system
How to encourage more educated, middle-class families to foster
Effective ways anyone can help improve the lives of foster kids

GET HIS BOOK

A Place Called Home

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Supernormal by Meg Jay, PhD
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog by Bruce Perry, MD, PhD
David's website
Follow him on Instagram
Follow him on Twitter

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