Johnny Madrid, an urban studies major, has worked steadily to improve conditions for youth in foster care. He drafted language for the Foster Child Bill of Rights, which became law in 2001. He has trained social workers and given speeches nationally on foster care. He has facilitated focus groups for research aimed at teaching college administrators how to get foster children to campus and support them once they’ve arrived. And as winner of a prestigious Harry S. Truman Scholarship, he now has $26,000 to use on graduate study that can help prepare him for a career in government, advocacy or education.
Madrid, ’03, is a native of Bell Gardens, Calif. After his mother was killed by a drunken driver when he was 11, he lived in 19 different homes, including 14 foster-care placements, before arriving at Stanford. He’s previously been a Civil Rights Fellow in Washington, D.C., and is interning this summer with the investment firm Goldman Sachs.
This year’s 77 Truman winners were selected from stiff competition. Madrid jokes that the scholarship application “is so long that it takes away from the stuff you’d do to win it.”
The scholars attended a week of leadership training in May at William Jewell College in Liberty, Mo. The group broke into teams to study public-policy quandaries; Madrid’s group studied ways to make the states more accountable for the $7 billion spent on foster care. Law school deans came to court the scholarship recipients and, Madrid says, “Michael Dukakis ate lunch with us and sat around talking. It was good times.”
