Dallas Nonprofit Heart of Courage Is Helping Mothers Get Their Children Back

When Larissa Retchless left Parkland Hospital’s labor and delivery ward in 2017, she left alone.

She had barely laid eyes on her one-week-old daughter, Kennedy, let alone had a chance to hold her. And she didn’t know when or even if she would ever be able to.

“They [hospital staff] told me once I left the hospital I couldn’t come back and see her in the NICU,” Retchless says. “That was it.”

Retchless was a methamphetamine addict. She had relocated to Dallas from Wichita Falls the day before her daughter was born. She was fleeing a life of addiction and seeking rehabilitation at Nexus Recovery, where she planned to enter treatment with her daughter.

Her plan was to finally get clean and to raise her daughter.

“I knew that I had made mistakes while I was pregnant and I waited too long to go to rehab,” Retchless says. “I naively thought, ‘Oh, I’m gonna have her and they’ll let me bring her back with me.’ That’s not what happened.”

Kennedy’s birth was chaotic. Retchless experienced placenta abruption, which cut off her daughter’s oxygen. The lack of oxygen caused the baby’s brain to bleed. She needed to be resuscitated immediately after the delivery via Caesarean section. The newborn received three shots of epinephrine, a drug administered during CPR to reverse cardiac arrest.

A week after being discharged, Retchless returned to Nexus. She was emotional, confused and hopeless. An employee of the rehab referred her to Heart of Courage, a Dallas nonprofit founded by Dania Carter.

“I had nobody around; it was a really hard time for me,” Retchless says. “A couple of days after I returned is when I actually met Dania. She became really [instrumental] for me, she was one of my main support systems when I was in Dallas.”

Heart of Courage, an organization dedicated to supporting and advocating for mothers who have lost custody of their children, was founded in 2013.

Carter had spent over a decade in corporate America, but her calling was in community service. In 2013, she was prepared to take a leap of faith. She had her own family and ailing mother to care for and needed to make sure her family was secure before she stepped into the nonprofit space. She also needed a focal point.

As she researched, she was alarmed by the number of children in state care and the lack of resources available to mothers trying to get them back.

“The stereotype is that these mothers have abused their children, and honestly, I think that’s probably such a small percentage of what actually goes through the child welfare system,” Carter says. “The biggest issue in the child welfare system is neglect. Neglect is such an umbrella-type definition because that could be domestic violence, homelessness or addiction, which is the mother’s own addiction.”

In Fiscal Year 2022, 2,845 children in Dallas County were in the care of the Department of Family Protective Services (DFPS), according to the agency, which also says 3,240 children were removed from their homes in DFPS Region 3 of Texas, which includes Dallas County.

Many of these mothers are met with criticism and often stereotyped. Carter says people have told her to “leave the kids alone” and that they’re “better off in foster care and getting adopted.”

“That’s not even remotely true,” she says.

Carter says most of these mothers are minorities. The issues they face are generational. Some have aged out of foster care themselves, and most have been in the child welfare system at one point.

As adults, they struggle with abandonment issues. Their lives are anchored by feelings of inadequacy and unanswered questions about their identities. Their abandonment issues can trigger potential problems with drugs and crime, creating a cycle that can simply continue for generations to come, Carter says.

“We have mothers that are saying, ‘I want this to stop at my generation. I don’t want my kids to have to go through what I went through,’” Carter says. “And where’s the support for this?”

Support and advocacy at Heart of Courage comes in many forms. Carter and her staff of eight meet each mother’s individual needs.

“You have to really look at the holistic person, the whole person, the whole mother, the whole parent, and look at what they really need,” Carter says.

The process begins with a self-sufficiency assessment. Heart of Courage analyzes everything from transportation to education to employment. The nonprofit looks at legal issues, child care and background, then creates priority goals based on this assessment.

These priority goals are paired with a plan with CPS, to help the mothers become self-sufficient. Mothers are assigned a peer advocate, many of whom are also mothers who have successfully gone through the Heart of Courage program. They help set up an action plan and connect clients with community resources.

“The goal is for mothers to no longer ever have to deal with CPS ever again, or be involved in the child welfare system,” Carter says.

click to enlarge

Larissa Retchless and her daughter, Kennedy, are back together thanks to a Dallas nonprofit.

Courtesy of Heart of Courage

For Retchless, one of the first Heart of Courage participants, this advocacy and support was hands-on.

“Dania [Carter] helped me find a place to stay and she gave me rides to work,” Retchless says. “She lived like two hours from where I worked and she would take me to work and pick me up. She had resources that I didn’t have readily available to me.”

Carter went to court with Retchless and helped her understand legal jargon and to make sense of the court’s demands. Carter served as Retchless’ CPS-required support system.

“She’s ‘Mama Dania,’” Carter says. “She just played that role for me while I was going through it all. I still call her that.”

The nonprofit’s vision includes incorporating a 12-step program that helps mothers with the process of getting their children back and transitioning into a sustainable productive lifestyle with their children in the home.

But first, Carter is looking to add two additional peer advocates. A grant awarded by Communities Foundation of Texas and The Dallas Foundation Award in January will help the organization meet its goals.

Heart of Courage was one of 20 nonprofits to receive a grant directed at nonprofits addressing racial inequity in Dallas. The organization received $10,000 and will use the funds to hire two additional peer advocates, pay a stipend to current peer advocates and pay for peer specialist certifications.

Life is still chaotic for Retchless, but in the best of ways, she says. She now lives in Indiana. Kennedy is 5, spunky and a proud big sister to her three-month-old brother Noah. Retchless is a stay-at-home mom with a loving partner who supports her. Their family is happy, healthy and flourishing.

“It’s a different life today,” Retchless says. “I still have moments where I can’t believe this is my life. I’m grateful and I’m appreciative and even on my worst day, it’s still better than it was before.”