For thousands of children entering foster care, one of the first things they are handed is a trash bag. Not a suitcase, not a backpack, but a plastic garbage bag to carry everything they own as they move from one home to the next. It is a quiet, overlooked part of the foster care experience, and it sends a message no child should receive.
That is where My Bag My Story steps in. As a Tennessee nonprofit working to end that practice, we replace trash bags with high-quality backpacks and duffle bags that a child can call their own, so that every child moving through Tennessee's foster care system does so with dignity.
To understand why this mission matters, let’s look at the problem it addresses.
The Reality in Tennessee
On any given day, nearly 9,000 children are in the foster care system in Tennessee. Behind that number are kids of every age, from newborns to teenagers, who have been removed from their homes for reasons entirely outside their control. Many will move more than once. Some children will move more than three times (one of the highest placement-rate averages in the nation), shuffling between relatives and foster homes as caseworkers search for a stable, lasting fit.
Every one of those moves is a moment of disruption and change to their daily life. And each disruption is a moment when a child needs something to carry their belongings in. Far too often, that something is a trash bag.
Why the Trash Bag, and Why It Keeps Happening
It’s important to understand that using trash bags isn’t about people being unkind. It happens because the system is under a lot of pressure.
Removals almost never happen on a set schedule. When a child has to leave home, it usually happens quickly, sometimes in just minutes, and often without warning. There’s no time to pack a suitcase, and often there isn’t one available. Caseworkers need something right away to hold a child’s clothes, shoes, and a few special items. Trash bags are cheap, easy to find, and can hold a lot, so they became the usual choice.
There's also a reason that has nothing to do with budgets or time. When a child is removed from an unsafe home, their belongings sometimes carry lice, bedbugs, mold, or other contamination, and sealing those items in a plastic bag helps keep an infestation from spreading into a new foster home.
In Oregon, the state agency reported that on the rare occasions it still opts for a plastic bag, the reasons sometimes included a child's items being unsanitary, such as lice, mold, or soiling. It's a sensible safety step, but it's one more way the garbage bag becomes the default, even when no one means to send a hurtful message.
This problem is even bigger in Tennessee, where foster children often move several times. Each move is another change, and another time when a trash bag might be the only option. What started as a quick fix has, over time, just become the normal way of doing things, and most people outside the system don’t question it or are simply unaware.
What it Does to a Child
Here is the part that is easy to miss from the outside. Children in crisis pay close attention to small things, and they read meaning into them.
Picture a child who has just been taken from everything familiar. They may be frightened, confused, and unsure of where they are going. And the container handed to them for their clothes, their photos, their favorite stuffed animal is the same kind of bag their family throws garbage into.
The message lands quietly but unmistakably: your things are disposable. And when a child's belongings feel disposable, it is a short and painful leap to feeling that they are too. At the very moment a child most needs to feel valued, the trash bag tells them the opposite.
Many who grew up in foster care carry the memory of that bag for years. It is a small object with an outsized weight.
What My Bag My Story is Doing
My Bag My Story exists to change that first message.
The organization was founded in 2019 by Cara Finger, a foster parent who kept seeing children arrive with their belongings in trash bags and refused to accept that it had to be normal. What started as a simple idea, giving a child a real bag to call their own, has grown into a statewide effort.
Nationwide, the trash bag is not going unchallenged. In the past few years, a handful of states have passed laws banning its use for moving foster children's belongings. Oregon, Texas, and Maryland have all enacted legislation requiring that children be given real luggage instead; Illinois did the same back in 2021, and New York has been weighing similar measures. Each of these laws carries the same idea: how a child carries their belongings is part of how we treat the child.
Today, My Bag My Story has donated more than 16,000 high-quality backpacks and duffel bags to children across Tennessee. The nonprofit works alongside more than 60 Dignity Partners, local organizations like Isaiah 117 House, Holston Home, Monroe Harding, and more, that serve children in foster care and get bags into their hands at the moment they need them most.
Each bag is sturdy, built to last, and meant to travel with a child from placement to placement. It replaces the garbage bag with something that says the opposite: your things are worth keeping, someone was expecting you, you matter.
A Big Problem With a Simple Answer
The trash bag is a heavy problem with a surprisingly small solution. When you donate $25 or more, you can provide a bag for a child entering Tennessee foster care and change the first message they receive from "your things are disposable" to "you matter."
That is what it means to #EndTheTrashBag, one child at a time. To learn more about the children, the partners, and the work behind it, visit MyBagMyStory.com.