Former Bedford foster child honors her late brother by helping others
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BEDFORD HILLS — At one point when Tanya Cooper was reading to her brother from the draft of her book about surviving foster care with a smile, her brother said: 'Coop, I think you are really going to do something here. This is going to save lives or change lives.'"
A year-and-a-half since the sudden death of that dear brother Robert Cooper to heart disease at age 41, Tanya Cooper is ready to test his prediction, starting with an outreach event planned in his honor at the Mount Kisco Library.
"This is about changing the way people think," says Cooper, 46, a Bedford Hills mother of two and an advocate who credits the Bedford community for enriching her life as a foster child. "Foster kids come in scared and frightened because they never know what is going to happen next."
That is saying a lot in Cooper's case. At the time she was placed in foster care, she and her baby brother Robert were being raised in Brooklyn by their 7-year-old sister, because their mother would disappear for days on drug binges.
There were good days in foster care and days she endured rape and death threats at the hands of her foster brothers, Cooper says.
"I want people to understand how someone feels in foster care," Cooper says. "It feels like an alien abduction."
Cooper's library event, planned for Wednesday during National Foster Care Month, is about trying to reach local children in foster care with a message that they are destined for special purposes. Even more, it is about reaching families in Westchester and Putnam counties with a message that little acts of kindness mean everything to a foster child.
"Something as simple as paying a kid a compliment can go so far," Cooper syas. "Foster kids don't get any acknowledgment except when they are doing something bad."
A highlight of the library event will be the inaugural Robert Cooper Memorial Scholarship presentation to a local foster child whose hope and positive spirit are part of a dream to succeed after he or she ages out of the system.
The memorial scholarship was created in a partnership with Megan Castellano of Carmel, the executive director of the Mental Health Association in Putnam County, and a high school friend of Robert Cooper's.
"He did a lot to lift up my self-esteem and what I didn't realize until I was older was that he was doing that for me and for others while he was having a hard time himself," Castellano said.
The hope is that after the $250 scholarship money is gone, the moment will linger for foster kids that they are heard and appreciated and supported, Castellano said.
In addition to the scholarship announcement and other awards that will be presented at the library event, Cooper will read from her book, "Surviving Foster Care and Making It Work for You!"
An extension of her two foster kids' blogs and her public speaking, the book sets guidelines for enjoying foster-care life and preparing for independence.
Anecdotally, it is also the story of how education, faith and friends helped Cooper make the transition from foster care to college and a career, so that she was able to give back.
Whatever her crisis, her brother Robert was always there, telling her not to give up, even as he waged his own battle with substance abuse.
"I didn't want every anniversary of his death to come around and say 'Oh, my poor brother,' " Cooper says. "This helps me stay positive and helps me to know that his death won't be in vain."
