Supporting Foster Care Alum Publish Their Story

My name is Alexis Lenderman-Black and my husband, Justin Black, and I are both foster care alumni and striving entrepreneurs. Last November, we published a book called Redefining Normal : How Two Foster Kids Beat The Odds And Discovered Healing, Happiness, and Love and started our Redefining Normal company serving youth, families, and institutions. Sharing our story with the world has been traumatic but empowering as we’ve received a welcoming and embracive response. Multiple young adults have been inspired and foster parents and communities have acknowledged the value of our content. Our mission has been to help improve the lives of other foster youth and those who have endured trauma and hardships during their childhood, just as we had.

Since self-publishing our book, we have sold over 6,000 books and we have been trying to release the audiobook version of our novel for some time, but we have run into problems along the way. The impact of our physical book has uplifted many youth, though being an emotional roller coaster for us to share our personal trauma and abuse. The audiobook has only required even more vulnerability by bringing our trauma to life through our words.

Our audiobook will:

Reach a greater audience of advocates and supporters of the foster care system and those who’ve experienced trauma

Encourage more youth to heal and go to redefining process as we inspired them to go beyond their comfort zone

Engage audiences curious about healing, understanding concepts of happiness, and learning more about their identity but are unable, or not interested in reading.

Maximizing our resources has allowed us to have a great impact on many people's lives. Financial support and assistance from family and friends has been futile. Unfortunately, we’ve reached a point where if we want to continue impacting lives, we will need to be open to receiving help from others as we invest our savings into providing outlets for youth. Our responsibility to help and serve is not neglected by the lack of support but these circumstances have made it difficult to continue. This is a lesson we’ve had to learn on our healing and growth journey. This is why we have turned to crowdfunding.

This audiobook is important to us because, along with our hardcopy book, this will help individuals, especially those in foster care, with learning how to identify healthy and unhealthy habits and that stem from family, friends, and romantic partners combined with changing unhealthy generational patterns. We want to help these individuals with their mental stability and growth, and personal healing. This investment is beyond ourselves but rather a commitment to stopping the cycle of trauma and abuse for the next generation.

The donations raised from this fundraiser will go directly to helping us create and publish our audiobook of Redefining Normal. Any amount is helpful and greatly appreciated.

You can find podcasts that we've appeared on and the promo video for our book here .

For more information about our mission, visit our website : re-definingnormal.com