A Minnesota based youth advocacy team helped lead a day-long retreat in Eau Claire designed to empower local fostered and adopted youth to speak out and make their voices heard.

The retreat offered young people who've been adopted or are in foster care the chance to connect with others facing a similar experience, sharing stories of the challenges they've faced, while learning how to use those stories to make a difference.

Life in the foster care system isn't a walk in the park.

"I've been struggling through, I've been packing up my little totes and trash bags and then just carrying it from one home to another," Willeona Hines, a former foster child said.

It's a difficult journey, and for many, like 19-year old Hines, who's passed through five different foster homes, it's often a lonely one.

"I lived with a relative for four years and she just put me back in the system," she said.

That's why, for fostered and adopted youth, the support and advice of a peer group is essential.

"It's a whole different dynamic when you hear from youth about their experiences in the foster-adoptive system, it's really powerful," social worker Erin Wall said.

So, the Reach project, a tri-state program including youth from Wisconsin, North Dakota and Minnesota is putting on retreats like this one, to help young people connect with their peers and prospective parents,while advocating for positive changes in the foster care and adoption system.

"There's a myth out there that older children, you know, they're too old to be adopted, or it's kind of a scary road to go down to adopt an older youth," Wall said.

But, she says no matter their age, these kids need a family too, a message the Reach project brings to prospective parents from the youth themselves.

"It's a bigger impact than a social worker saying it," Wall said.

Wall says another goal of Saturday's retreat was to find a group of fostered and adopted youth, right here in the Chippewa Valley, who are interested in changing the system and are willing to join a new local youth advocacy group.