To Disclose or Not to Disclose...

I just started a new job, hence the decrease in posts, and I find myself in an odd situation. My supervisor wrote a letter announcing my arrival and briefly stating my past experience and expertise. It was a nice thing to do and a well-written letter. Many of my employees have read the letter and commented on it already.

Mentioned in the letter and relevant to the job, is my foster care work. Though I'm not working directly in foster care, the overlap between foster care and my job makes it worth mentioning. The thing is, most people only get into foster care because they were a foster kid or knew a foster kid. People always seem to want to know which it was for me.

In my last job, it was known to pretty much all of my colleagues that I grew up in care and I was okay with that. I'm not sure that I want to tell everyone at my new job though. For starters, in my last job, I was encouraged to socailize with my colleagues, thus making it okay to disclose more personal information about myself to them. Here, I am a supervisor and socializing with employees outside of work has been discouraged by my boss. My thought is, if I am not to hang out, perhaps I am to keep my personal life to myself in general. This won't be easy, since I have only been there a week and some of my employees have already started asking about my background. What am I supposed to say if they ask how I got involved in foster care?

If I don't disclose that I was in foster care, they may still figure it out, since I am only 24, but having over two decades of experience advocating for a person with disabilties helped land me this job. If I explain that my mom is disabled and lives in a home for people with disabilties, a smart person will put two and two together to realize I was in foster care. Also, I do trainings for foster parents on the weekends and frequently have articles published in magazines, newspapers and on-line. I am fully identifiable by the accompanying photo and/or biography. Once they figure out I was a foster child, they might assume I had solely negative foster care experiences, since I did not disclose this in the first place. I am far from ashamed that I was in foster care, but I wonder if it would be unprofessional to disclose such personal information to my employees. It feels like it might be crossing some invisible line.

My husband disagrees. His opinion is that being a foster kid and the child of a person with a disability are job credentials in this case and thus it is okay to state those facts. In his opinion, making this information known will only make it more clear to my staff and others with whom we interact as a company that I have the kind of know-how and compassion needed to do my job. It will send the message that I care about vulnerable people and will not accept things that are not in their best interests.

I'm not sure yet what I will do. If I do not disclose, this will be the first time in my life that I have not done so. I have always been very upfront about it in school, at other jobs and with friends. I have taken every opportunity possible to educate people about foster care and recruit people to be foster parents if I think they would be good at it. On the one hand, it makes me feel good to enlighten people about foster care and potentially bring more people into the circle. On the other hand, I've always felt a little bit exposed by disclosing my past. It might be nice to not feel emotionally naked for a while.