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By Karen Weese, FastCompany, September 14, 2023
It didn’t seem like much—only $100. But Tiffany Simone didn’t have $100. And she couldn’t get her kids back any other way.
Simone had voluntarily placed her two children, 8-year-old Russell and 11-year-old Destinie, into the care of the state because she had no one who could watch them while she was hospitalized for a medical emergency. She assumed she would pick them up when she left the hospital, but the state said that, as a condition of their return, Simone first had to participate in supervised visits at a distant foster care office. (Simone is her middle name, which she requested be used in order to keep her children anonymous.)
Just a year prior, Simone could have made it to those visits easily—back when she still had a steady income from her job as a network administrator, a savings account, and a car. But she’d lost all of those things in her battle with ovarian cancer, and making the two-hour round-trip journey via public transportation would have cost $100 she didn’t have.
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