Glenn Koster wants to draw more awareness to the needs of the many kids in the foster care system, and he’s willing to walk the extra mile – or more – to do just that.

Last week, the Hutchinson resident walked from St. John to Great Bend as part of his mission to walk to all 105 county seats in Kansas by Nov. 30, 2022 to bring awareness to what he sees as a glaring need for more good homes for kids in foster care.

His 20-plus mile walk from the Stafford County seat to the Jack Kilby Square in the Barton County seat on Aug. 2 marked counties number eight and nine on this year-and-a-half long mission, which began earlier this year.

For Koster, though, an associate pastor with First Church of God in Hutchinson, after 40 years working in IT, the mission is not a far-off vision, but a personal crusade for a man who was a product of the foster system himself.

Glenn’s redemptive story

Koster entered the foster care system after being abandoned by his parents at the age of 6. While two of Koster’s older brothers were claimed by their birth fathers, Koster was not.

While Koster was adopted quickly, the experience was not a positive one. In his first adoptive home, Koster experience physical and sexual abuse, as well as neglect, so he re-entered the foster care system. However, he lost his next foster father to a sudden heart attack.

Though he was re-adopted into a what he described as a good home at the age of 10 in 1966, he said his own experiences in the foster care system led him as a young adult to emulate the same destructive patterns as his birth father, initially turning to alcoholism and becoming and abuser himself as a young adult.

Eventually, though, things changed for Koster.

In the spring of 1989, Koster said he turned away from alcohol and the abusive patterns of his own childhood, and though he was not arrested for abuse or alcohol-related offenses, he self-reported the offenses to police. He said he speaks openly about it now to encourage others to get out of these lifestyles.

Because of his own history, he cannot be a foster or adoptive parent himself, but he still wanted to find a way to advocate for kids in foster care.

That’s when Koster took his first steps on what would become a personal crusade for foster kids.

Previous walks

In 2012, Koster, then working in IT, began walking as part of a workplace fitness challenge, and a passion was born.

Two years later, he decided to take it many steps further, and walk from Oklahoma to Nebraska to see if he was capable of long-distance walking, traversing 187 miles in ten days. The next year, to celebrate his 60th birthday, he walked from Missouri to Holly, Colo., raising $10,000 for child-related charities in central Kansas.

This, however, was just the beginning of his pedestrian mission for kids in foster care.

In 2016, Koster set out to walk 4,310 miles from South Miami Beach, Fla., to Westport, Wash., west of Seattle on the Pacific coast. The attempt, however, was derailed in Chadron, Neb., due to issues with the brakes on his support vehicle. By the time the vehicle was repaired, winter was setting in in the Rockies, temporarily detouring his attempt.

Not to be deterred, he returned to Chadron in June 2019 and set out to finish what he started. He stepped foot in the Pacific Ocean Aug. 28, 2019.

“In that, I said if just one family became a foster parent, or one child found a forever home (because of hearing the story), then every step would have been worthwhile,” Koster said.

Instead, he said, he found out about seven families who began providing foster care, and at least five kids who were adopted, as a result of the story he was able to tell so many people on his cross-country walk.

But he still wanted to bring it more local, and raise awareness in his own state.

So he hatched an idea to walk to, or from, each county seat in Kansas, to bring awareness to kids in the foster care system in the state, beginning in Harvey County, which has the highest per capita foster care rate of any of the state’s 105 counties.

While Barton and Stafford counties are middle of the road in this statistic, he said, he chose the two counties because in both, there are at least 25 kids between the two counties that need to be placed into homes, but no available homes to put them in, so there is a deep need for caring homes.

He currently undertakes these inter-county walks each Monday, three Mondays a month, with his wife providing support in the family’s 33-foot long RV.

What it takes

Koster estimates he has walked 18,500 miles since he began in September 2015, or an average of over ten miles a day. Though it is his long walks that draw attention to his story, Koster said it takes a great deal of training and preparation to keep him in shape for the distances he walks.

When he began training for the cross country walk, he walked every step of every paved street in the city of Hutchinson. In 2017, he trained by walking every county road in Reno County, beginning in downtown Hutchinson and working his way out. 

His longest single training day was more than 38 miles, to make sure he could hold up to longer days. His shorter training days still average 18-20 miles. He aims to walk around 80 miles per week, with his highest week being around 120. 

He has also walked in all types of weather, from rain, to fog, to snow. He has walked in temperatures ranging from the scorching heat of summer, to the bitter cold of 15 degrees above zero during last February’s cold snap.

Like so many, though, he admits there are days he does not feel like training, but staying focused on his goal and mission keeps him driven to step out the door each day.

“I have those days where I ask, ‘do I really want to go out there,’ and my answer has to be yes,” he said.

He does not walk unprepared, though. His wife drives a support vehicle which meets him at the end of each day’s walk, and to ensure his safety, the two make contact by phone at least once every hour. He walks with 8-10 bottles of water and four to five bottles of Gatorade, consuming sometimes over 200 ounces of fluid in a day. He also carries snacks to keep nourished, as well as lunch he can eat by the side of the road.

Anyone wishing to follow Koster’s journey can do so on Facebook by visiting https://www.facebook.com/KSCharitySteps.