SHERIDAN — When Carla Crayton was 8 years old, her mother packed Crayton’s bags and put her on a plane in Minnesota to go and live with a first cousin in Kansas.

There had been no warning that this was going to happen. She’d never been on a plane before, much less on a plane by herself.

And she had never even met this adult cousin or his wife, who were going to become her foster parents.

She was, to say the least, terrified.

“My foster parents recount that they saw me get off the plane with my teddy bear, and I was hugging it like this,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself. “That’s how it all began.”

Today, Crayton runs the Sheridan Foster Care Exchange, a nonprofit she started in 2012 after she became a foster parent herself.

Crayton makes sure each child who enters the foste

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