Until five months ago, Daniel R. Soza III had no idea that his service career would change 180 degrees, to a focus on helping international refugee children and teens find U.S.A. placement in foster care.
He had started back before the 2000 millennium working close to home, first with the Boy Scouts. Next, at Samaritas Community Center (better known as Neighborhood House), he was entering his fifth year as director when the doors suddenly were closed last December.
But Samaritas, renamed by Lutheran Social Services, kept him on board with a shift to refugee foster care, spanning most of Lower Michigan. His focus suddenly changed from young people near his doorstep to those in faraway lands.
Few career changes can be so clear-cut.
Aid for cultural children
For years, Latino families who are committed to international child rescue often have expressed special cultural interest in children from Mexico and from Central America. Publicity peaked during the Trump Administration with endless horrific reports of family separations along the Rio Grande border.
Soza’s newfound role is to help recruit, counsel, and screen potential foster care families, who are volunteering among Mexican Americans in numbers that have soared, even during covid times.
“It’s by far the most rewarding work that I’ve had, and I’m really happy with it,” Daniel III says.
His office is in Lansing, following the same route his father, Daniel G. Soza Jr. took to work as an academic counselor at Michigan State University.
Foster care applicants across Lower Michigan usually opt for several years of long-term support to a teenager who has little chance of re-engaging with a home family. Expense stipends in the range of $25 per day help cover costs for housing, clothing and food. A Samaritas information brochure notes that the teens have “endured traumatic events in their short lives.”
The outline continues, “You can help them adjust to the educational, financial, political and social systems in the United States. You can support them as they learn to be independent while also encouraging them to renew connections to their culture of origin.”
Another option, mostly for families closer to Lansing and Ann Arbor, is transitional short-term foster care, 15 to 45 days, for grade school and middle school children who await reunions with their identified parents or family elders. In rare cases, circumstances or tragedies may expand these time spans, but permanent adoptions are not, in any way, involved in the process.
One of Soza’s most rewarding days was when he chaperoned a boy back to Houston for a return to his parents.
“If I do well,” he says, “I can help keep some kids out of those cages.”
For more information, visit samaritas.org. Call Soza at (989) 780-2263 or email him at dsoza@samaritas.org.
Lutheran Social Services was renamed as Samaritas to reflect that services are for all people, not only for those of Lutheran faith. The Samaritas Senior Living of Saginaw care home continues to operate at 3200 State between Mackinaw and Bay Streets.
Like father and grandpa, like son
Seven years after his father’s passing, Daniel III still welcomes questions and memories from friends of his father, Daniel G. Soza Jr.
They followed similar educational paths, starting with Catholic high schools (St. Joseph for Dan Jr., Nouvel for Dan III), followed by Delta College and then MSU.
Dan Jr. (1948 to 2014) later was known for his social and political activism, everything from bring Cesar Chavez to town multiple times, to leadership with Union Civica Mexicana, to 12 pioneering years on the Saginaw City Council, to the national presidency of HELO, Hispanic Elected Local Officials.
However, Daniel III’s top recollections are not of big rallies or events.
“In my earliest memories,” he says, “I would ride with my father while he went to the greenhouses around Saginaw, picked up donations of plants and flowers, and went to the homes of senior citizens to encourage them start gardens. I would help him dig the holes.
“One year there was a Saginaw News article,” he continues, “but he didn’t want publicity and it wasn’t part of any program that he was involved in. It was simply something he wanted to do.
“Things were similar to with my grandpa (Daniel C. Soza Sr.) when he would organize the Mexican softball recreation leagues, or when he would work as a school crossing guard, always there to take me with him.”
Daniel III is married to his 1990s MSU sweetheart, Fenis, pronounced “Fee-neese” with two children.
For now, he aims to stick with international foster care arrangements. Still, he laments the loss of Neighborhood House, a site where he had reduced an annual $200,000 operating subsidy in half and where he was headed for break-even if Covid-19 had not killed a potential charter school arrangement with the state Department of Education.
“Now we’re down to one community center, First Ward, and they’re at the other edge of town,” Soza notes. “Unless things change among the priorities of the funding sources, I’m not seeing any place for our kids to go.”
