Isabella Portantino was the guest speaker at a recent meeting of the Italian Catholic Federation Branch 374 at St. Bede the Venerable Church in La Cañada Flintridge.

Portantino is working on her Girl Scout Gold Award project with the Friends of Foster Children. For her project she put together a cookbook with easy and inexpensive recipes, made fleece-tie blankets to put into welcome home packages for the FOFC’s My First Apartment program that aids emancipated youth in finding apartments and attended a foster youth town hall where she distributed some of the cookbooks along with providing a sample of one of the recipes in the cookbook. She is making presentations about emancipated foster youth to various organizations, offering ways to help out organizations such as FOFC.

The Girl Scout described emancipation and how it is associated with foster care. She described emancipation as when individuals turn 18 years old and are no longer stay in the foster care system. After leaving the system, many of these former foster care youth have trouble balancing school and jobs and managing their finances. It is believed that approximately 40-50% of emancipated foster youth end up homeless because of the struggles they encounter. Less than 50% of foster youth graduate from high school and only 3% graduate from college.

Portantino is the eldest daughter of local residents State Senator Anthony Portantino and his wife Ellen.

She is planning a career in communication when she completes high school.

  AL RESTIVO