Detroit Couple Raised 70 Foster Kids. The Community Refused to Let Them Face Eviction.

For more than four decades, Stephen and Loretta Rodriguez did something quietly extraordinary. They opened the door of their Detroit home to children who had nowhere else to go — and kept opening it, again and again, for decades.

Now in their 80s — Stephen is 85, Loretta is 79 — the couple is believed to have raised between 60 and 70 foster children over the course of their lives together. They have been married for 43 years. And recently, when they needed help themselves, the community they had given so much to showed up for them in a way they never expected.

A Lifetime of Saying Yes

Most people who foster children do so for a season of their lives — a few years, maybe a decade. The Rodriguezes made it a calling. Across four decades of marriage, they welcomed child after child into their home, providing stability, love, and a sense of family to kids who had lost access to all three.

One of those children was Shana Risby. Born to a mother struggling with addiction, Risby was given up at birth. The Rodriguezes took her in and raised her as their own.

"I'm just grateful that I was raised by two people whose main purpose is to pour love," Risby said.

She is now an adult living in California, carrying with her the foundation the Rodriguezes built. She is one of dozens of people whose lives were shaped in the house on that Detroit street — one of dozens who can trace something essential about who they are back to a couple who simply kept saying yes when children needed a home.

The Crisis

It is a particular kind of gut punch when people who have spent their lives protecting others suddenly find themselves vulnerable.

That's what happened to Stephen and Loretta. At 85 and 79, after a lifetime of providing stability to children who had none, the couple found themselves facing eviction from their home. When Risby — the little girl they had taken in at birth — learned what was happening, she was stunned.

"When they told me they were going to be evicted from their home, it was really shocking to me," she said. "It's something they've never experienced before."

The people who had spent decades catching children who were falling had no safety net of their own. That was about to change.

The Community Responds

Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries, led by Dr. Chad Audi, stepped in. The organization provided the Rodriguezes with a fully furnished home — complete with furnished bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a washer and dryer, new flooring, and a refrigerator already stocked with groceries. The couple will be able to live there rent free for the next two years.

For an organization built around the idea of serving people in crisis, this was a case that didn't require much deliberation. Stephen and Loretta Rodriguez had spent the better part of their adult lives protecting some of the most vulnerable children in their city. When the call came to protect them, the answer was obvious.

Full Circle

There is something deeply moving about the shape of this story. A woman who came into the world with nothing — no stable home, a mother in the grip of addiction — grew up, built a life, and then found herself in a position to advocate for the people who had made all of it possible. The child who was once rescued was now part of the effort to rescue them back.

That is what Shana Risby experienced when Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries stepped in. The couple who had opened their door to her, and to so many others, would have a door to open again.

"They never experienced this before," Risby said of the crisis her grandparents had faced. She didn't have to say what the other half of that sentence meant — that they had spent their whole lives making sure other people never experienced it either.

Stephen and Loretta Rodriguez are, by any reasonable measure, two of the more remarkable people in their city. They didn't do what they did for recognition. They did it because children needed homes and they had one. The community of Detroit simply made sure they still do.

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