Like many people, Vermont film producer and director Bess O’Brien was aware of foster care but didn’t know much about it.  That is, until a former foster child named Kellie Coakley, 26, saw one of O’Brien’s films and telephoned her a few days later with a proposition.

“Kellie said, ‘You don’t know who I am and I don’t know what your next film will be but it would be great to do a film about foster care because we are so invisible and nobody knows our story,’” O’Brien told SocialWorkersSpeak.org.

That conversation led to O’Brien making “Ask Us Who We Are,” a 2011 documentary that lets Vermont foster children, birth parents, relatives, foster parents and others give first-hand accounts of what the system means to them.