The Last Leaf On The Tree
The Last Leaf: Fifty years of diaries, short-stories, and poetry capturing a 16-year odyssey through New York City’s Bureau of Child Welfare System. I am BCW Case # 2017913-907. This is a true journey of institutional care, foster care, mental hospitals, and then aging-out into homelessness.  These diaries record my search for a safe place to belong and the role the United States Air Force played in making a future, and excelling beyond my fifth grade math skills into the medical laboratory sciences.
Donnellan’s diaries are a historical collection, providing rare insights into the plight of unwanted children in state care, and of how that experience altered their emotive capacities and lifetime potentials.  These struggles are confronted in ink. Lastly, these philosophically driven works examine the good and evil in our nature, the existence of soul, and of true healing through a life-long dedication to writing.
The Last Leaf
Read Donnellan’s Works
About Donnellan
My journey through NYC's child welfare system was a life lived with strangers in so many places. It taught me to live within and be mindful of human nature with an analytic curiosity. I was diagnosed retarded from 1st - 5th grade in P.S. 108 Queens because I could not learn their way. I had taught myself to read.
While living in a car I enlisted. The US Air Force saved my life and altered my downward trajectory. I served 22 years in pathology. Post military; English composition teacher. Over decades I hid who I was and what I came from. Through a lifetime of diaries I made a home in ink and found real truths in the examined life.
With help from the GI Bill I earned five academic degrees, to include Master’s in Education, Psychology, and Modernist Lit/Phil.  I teach AP English. My side gig, Sifu, Wing-Chun Kung-Fu.  Lineage: Ip Man, Yeung Ting, and my master, Gilbert Leal.
The Missing Puzzle Piece
How to use my experience, my diaries, to help others. To forward the gift of survival to those still in search. Each person must bring the light they have. I have a pen.
Child Wellness
A goal of these works is to show what goes on inside a child developmentally. The diaries reveal the importance of having one person a child can talk with.
Detailed Accounts
If you read enough of the diary entries and stories, the details become clear. Fifty years holds a lot of detail.
Putting It Into Prespective
Having had the experience of the child care system and mental health institutions, on both sides of the desk, I have insights rarely earned on one side. I hope to bring you to the other side. The system side.
The Current Landscape
We are woefully serving children in state care. The present system cannot serve the myriad challenges of orphans from the opioid epidemic, the trafficked, and foster children across this nation without placements.
Actionable Change
The first step to real change is to know where the nearest orphanage is to where you live. Then, each who can must aide a child in any way of wholesome goodness.
Peter
Professor, MIT
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Peter
Professor, MIT
Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit volup tatem accusanti dolore unde omnis is te natus mque laudantium, totam rem aperiam consectetur adipiscing elit, por incididunt dolore magna aliqua.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisc ing elit, sed do eius mod tem por incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
Peter
Professor, MIT
Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit volup tatem accusanti dolore unde omnis is te natus mque laudantium, totam rem aperiam consectetur adipiscing elit, por incididunt dolore magna aliqua.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisc ing elit, sed do eius mod tem por incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
Peter
Professor, MIT
Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit volup tatem accusanti dolore unde omnis is te natus mque laudantium, totam rem aperiam consectetur adipiscing elit, por incididunt dolore magna aliqua.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisc ing elit, sed do eius mod tem por incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.