WASHINGTON -- In a unanimous decision June 17, the Supreme Court said that a Catholic social service agency should not have been excluded from Philadelphia's foster care program because it did not accept same-sex couples as foster parents.

WASHINGTON – Charles Mully has had an incredible life story. And he's not finished yet.

The Kenyan-born Mully, 68, was abandoned by his family when he was 6 years old. For a decade, he scratched out a living for himself. At age 16, he encountered Christ in a personal way and later became a successful businessman, but he ditched it all to establish the Mully Children's Family, a home to shelter kids who had been abandoned like he once had been.

Janelle Younge was 14 when she called Toronto’s Catholic Children’s Aid Society. When the social worker arrived and saw bruises spread across Younge’s face and arms, she wanted the girl out of the house right away, before her father got home.

This is Part 2 of our two-part series looking at reforms to Ontario’s child welfare system. Click here to read part 1.

We’re all born equal, but we’re born into different circumstances. When the circumstances are worse than just unequal, the rest of us are supposed to do something about it. That’s why we have children’s aid societies.

Danielle remembers counting down the days until she would turn 16. On that day she was going to sign herself out of foster care, declare her freedom, begin her life for real.

Children are our future. While this truism emphasizes that children grow up to either perpetuate or change the legacies left behind by their forebears, it is questionable whether these implications are considered in the system that cares for Canada’s most vulnerable youth.

TORONTO - There’s no map to guide foster kids from life in the system to life in the world. But Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto and Covenant House think the Ontario government could learn from their experience leading kids through one of the most difficult passages in life.

A report written by foster kids themselves — My Real Life Book based on more than 200 submissions from youth in care — is challenging Ontario’s Ministry of Children and Youth Services to do better for the province’s 8,300 crown wards. Crown wards are in the permanent care of the state in foster or group homes. Another 8,500 kids per year pass through the child welfare system in temporary care.