Native advocate hopes to change transform state's child welfare record

Feb. 10—Veronica Krupnick can almost point to the day her life changed forever.

She was 10, a few weeks from the end of fourth grade and about to be adopted by her latest foster parents.

In one sense, it would be the end of a period marked by turmoil. Born to a 16-year-old mother who later had her parental rights terminated, Krupnick had been bouncing around New Mexico's child welfare system for four years. She'd experienced every type of placement — a group home, kinship placement, foster homes.

But for Krupnick, who is Hopi, Jemez Pueblo and Navajo, her and her sister's "closed" adoption by a white family also marked the moment she lost most of the family she had known.

"I knew my family. I knew my cousins, my aunts, my uncles, my great-grandparents," said Krupnick, now 28 and a Santa Fe resident. "I had dogs. I had a home. ... When you lose your entire world, how do you get over that?"

In the last decade, she's attended college, built a career as a leading advocate for children in the state's child welfare system and eventually landed her current position as a year-round legislative analyst for state Rep. Gail Chasey, an Albuquerque Democrat and the House majority leader. Last year she got involved at the national level, advocating to uphold the Indian Child Welfare Act.

Krupnick has earned high-profile national honors for her work, recently receiving the Casey Excellence for Children Alumni Award from Casey Family Programs and the Child Welfare & Juvenile Justice Hope in Action Excellence Award from the Children's Law Institute.

She was named a delegate to the International Foster Care Alliance Summit next year in Tokyo.

Krupnick said securing the legislative job about a year ago was a major moment for her after she had spent years "banging on the door to have a seat at the table."

"This was not just a win for me," she said. "It was a win for everything and everyone I represent — tribes, young people who have experienced foster care ... kids who have been involved in juvenile justice. This felt like a really, really positive step for me."

The abuse and trauma she experienced throughout her early years are still with her. They continue to inform her views on the child welfare system. She noted authorities often step in when a child needs to be removed from their home — and by then it's too late.

"Why do we have to have these services tied to when you hit your lowest point?" Krupnick said. "Now we'll help you? When you've lost your kids, when you're on the street, now you get help?"

Krupnick's first year on the legislative staff has coincided with a period of intense scrutiny on the state's beleaguered Children, Youth and Families Department. The agency has a backlog of more than 2,000 investigations and has struggled with massive caseloads and understaffing.

Even under the best of circumstances, Krupnick said, CYFD is a "post-trauma intervention service."

"The trauma that was going to impact the rest of my life had already happened," she said. "By the time that agency touched my life, the harm was there."

Krupnick was born in Tuba City, Ariz. Her father was a teenager who had lost his own mother at an early age, and her young mother had substance use issues. Her own early years were punctuated by abuse, unstable living and even suicidal thoughts, she said.

She believes interventions should come earlier in kids' lives, such as help for young parents like her biological mother and father.

'So much to catch up on'

Being adopted wasn't a magic bullet for 10-year-old Krupnick.

Her fifth grade year was the first time she attended school steadily.

"I really didn't know how to read. I didn't know how to do, like, simple math," she said. "I had so much to catch up on by the time I was in my final foster placement, which would become my adoptive parents."

It was hard to feel like she belonged, either at home or at school — something she said is typical for children going through the foster system.

Krupnick said being separated from her Native relatives was also a traumatic adjustment, although her adoptive parents did "the best they could knowing what they knew."

"Navigating transracial adoption was definitely, definitely a steep learning curve that I don't think anyone's really prepared for," she said. "There's just experiences that ... my sister and I are going to have that my parents might never understand."

Krupnick said her preteen and teenage years were marked by "living on impulses and bad decisions." She spent time in a youth shelter and in the juvenile criminal justice system.

At 16, she chose to go to a residential behavioral health treatment center in Utah, which helped her "ground herself." She later moved into a transitional living program that allowed her more freedom, where she worked and went to school.

Healing through helping

Krupnick was accepted to Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., which she described as the first time she was able to "just be myself."

"There weren't people 24 hours surveilling me. There weren't lockdown situations," she said. "I got to just be a person."

She studied public health and became heavily involved with a student group called the Wellness Peer Advisory Council. The group offered campus resources on topics like sexual assault and suicide prevention.

"I feel like they really set my trajectory of how I got here," she said. "I felt like I got to use the pain of everything prior to [age] 18 for a purpose, and I got to ... heal myself by getting to heal other people."

After college, Krupnick worked as a foster youth advocate with Court Appointed Special Advocates for the First Judicial District in Santa Fe — better known as CASA First.

"They got to ask me questions that they felt like they couldn't ask anybody else," Krupnick said.

Some of the questions were heartachingly familiar: How did you forgive your mom? Did you ever forgive her? I haven't seen my sibling for six months; will they even remember me?

As her advocacy grew, she took on more leadership and educational roles, conducting trainings and eventually organizing national panels with others who had been through the foster system to help educate people working in that field.

"I think by now I've nearly trained every children's court judge, hearing officer, [guardian ad litem], youth attorney and social worker in this state, in some shape or form," she said.

Annie Rasquin, CASA First's executive director and Krupnick's boss for five years, said that's no exaggeration.

"She had a profound impact on us, and still does," Rasquin said. "She's been invited to speak to, like, all of the child welfare judges because she is such a powerful speaker because she talks from the heart."

Rasquin said Krupnick's work bringing in lived-experience experts like herself has been particularly effective.

"I think it's one of the beautiful things she does," Rasquin said. "She brings other voices to the table and kind of synthesizes them — and she sometimes takes a back seat."