LA Daily News
9/15/2006
Our Community
A Bright Future
Catching up with the Bellew sisters, another of Five Acres' success stories
By Gloria Renwick, Correspondent
U-Entertainment
On the last Saturday in August I met with Katherine and Allison Bellew for a casual lunch and plenty of talk during their brief visit home.
It was a repeat of our lunch date of last summer. The three of us first met on the Altadena campus of Five Acres in August of 2004.
Some of you will remember that at ages 10 and 11, these two young women were abandoned by their mother and, with little support from what family they had, ended up as wards of the court and the Los Angeles County Child Welfare System.
Very luckily for them, Five Acres had an opening in their foster care program and swept the Bellew sisters up in their caring embrace.
Five Acres, which was founded as an orphanage in 1888, has a reputation as a foster care, treatment and education center that nurtures their children into adulthood with exceptional long-term success. The Bellews have to be their tiptop gold star winners.
The girls lived with two foster moms as they completed their educations in the public schools of their old neighborhood. Through their own abilities and hard work and with the guidance of Mary Gleason, their Five Acres caseworker, both Kat and Allie were awarded college scholarships.
Kat chose Cal Poly San Luis Obispo because of their top-rated animal science program.
Allie was offered the opportunity of attending Smith College in North Hampton, Mass., and left for college with a pre-med major in mind.
My meetings with the Bellew sisters have turned out to be an annual event, so that I can continue to report their progress through college - and their lives.
This past February Kat turned 21. She was living in a trailer with her best friend, Jamie. It was free university housing because the two young women were responsible for Cal Poly's beef cattle evaluation center where, among many other things, they tested 380 bulls for their reproductive ability and prepared them for the annual fall sale; the sale attracts ranchers from all over who wish to purchase new blood for their herds.
While the year-long experience paralleled her studies it also proved to be far more time consuming than Kat expected. Since it was considered an extra-curricular activity, she received no academic credit and was disappointed with the effect on her grade point average.
When classes began this fall, Kat started her fourth year. Her goals demand a high grade point average, so she spent the summer working as an intern at the Los Angeles Zoo, saved her money and left the free housing for a rental with three other girls. She intends to concentrate on her studies and perhaps improve her grades enough to get into graduate school.
All along, Kat has been open to various careers in animal science. As a freshman she thought about being a large animal vet. Last year she considered being a zoo vet and specializing in exotic animals. Now she is interested in becoming an animal behaviorist and her professors are encouraging her.
"There seems to be a growing need for behaviorists on large production ranches and processing plants to design and help make working facilities more humane and efficient at moving or working the animals," Kat said. "There is a woman at Colorado State University who has made a lot of headway. I hope to work with her and others."
I asked her where she thought she would be in five years.
"I'll be with Dan (her longtime boyfriend) and my dog, Bailey, at school somewhere either working on a master's or a doctorate in veterinary medicine," she said. "As someone famous once said, `Wherever the wind takes me.' "
On Aug. 31, Allie celebrated her 20th birthday and on Sept. 2, she left for her junior year at Smith.
Allie's interest in a pre-med course never got off the ground. She quickly found computer science far more interesting and with huge career potential. But even with her degree of focus, Allie experienced the infamous sophomore slump last spring.
"I just couldn't figure out what I was doing or why, but I've sorted it all out in my head," she said. "Mostly I couldn't figure out why I was working so hard when I hadn't established my goals. Now I know that my goals are to graduate and get a well-paying job doing network security. In five years, I want to have all my student loans paid off, and once that's done, I would begin to discuss my options for grad school.
"I love Smith," Allie added with emphasis. "I couldn't have picked a better college for me & to be so far away from home and to be totally taken care of whenever I need help.
"Over the past year I've really expanded my involvement in school and the computer science/information technology world. I was chosen to be one of two computer science department liaisons and was invited to participate in all faculty meetings."
Her academic ambitions continue to be vast. She is a computer science major with a minor in electrical engineering.
"I hope to participate in a senior design clinic with the engineering department my senior year," she said. "A design clinic lets you work on a project for a company all year long and then present a commercial product at the end."
Allie was also featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education as part of a piece written about private universities and how they "take care of" students who are on full financial aid. She said that when the magazine learned she was a foster child and all the way from California they were particularly glad they had interviewed her.
In discussing the effect of seven years of foster care on their lives, both of these young women consider it as a positive experience.
"I feel that the impact of foster care has been for the better but maybe that is because of the care we got," Kat said. "I am happy and strong and willing to take the risks necessary to achieve my goals, no matter how uncertain they may be. I think foster care had something to do with helping me accept the challenge and take the risks."
"Foster care has grounded me and given me a life perspective that makes it easier for me to go to an elite private university full of mostly upper class women," Allie said. "I can make huge goals for myself and then set about accomplishing them knowing that when I need help I can build a support system anywhere I go and be confident that I will succeed."
Though neither Kat nor Allie have visited Five Acres recently, Allie said she exchanges e-mails with Mary Gleason while Kat visits her first foster mom. Both remain very close to their second mom, Sandra Loffredo, and her family.
Off in the distant future, both Bellew sisters hope to marry and have children, so that they can finally have a family that they never had. Kat and her boyfriend have an ongoing commitment they both consider permanent, she said. Allie broke up with her high school boyfriend in February and, while working at an East Coast summer camp, met a young man named Joshua Dilk from upstate New York. Joshua is attending law school in Buffalo.
Long term? Who knows?
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