Andrew Harnik/AP

Former White House national security aide Fiona Hill and David Holmes, a U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, appear before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Nov. 21, 2019, near the end of two weeks of public impeachment hearings.

The first phase of the Democratic-led House impeachment inquiry has produced a vivid and fact-studded picture of an American government and diplomatic corps struggling to deal with the whims of a mercurial president while trying to prevent policy toward Ukraine, an ally at war with Russia, from being shoved completely off the rails.

Hours of testimony have indicated that President Donald Trump, at the least, was willing to withhold things Ukrainian leaders wanted until they announced investigations that touched on his political opponents and a discredited theory about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

This has pushed many Democrats in the House ever closer to voting for President Trump’s impeachment. Such a vote, if not the outcome, now seems foreordained.

Hours of testimony also left holes in the picture. No witness linked the president directly to the most serious impeachment charge: that he withheld much-desired and congressionally authorized military aid, specifically, over a new Ukrainian president’s reluctance to announce politically tinged probes.

Two weeks of public hearings did not move the vote of a single House Republican, it appears. All seem set to say “no” in an impeachment roll call.

The result is a nation where it was before, with Congress split along partisan lines that roughly mirror popular opinion about impeachment, close to a 50-50 cleavage if polls are an accurate guide.

In the last scheduled House Intelligence Committee public hearing, in her opening statement, former White House Russia adviser Fiona Hill eloquently pleaded for Americans to disregard the “fictions” about Ukraine promoted by U.S. adversaries, to focus on the true dangers that face them, and to realize that one of those is anger itself.

“When we are consumed by partisan rancor, we cannot combat these external forces as they seek to divide us against each another, degrade our institutions, and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy,” Dr. Hill said.

Diplomatic irregularities

In retrospect, the two weeks of House Intelligence Committee public hearings attempted to present a coherent story about a complicated situation: irregularities in the conduct of American foreign relations with a nation still struggling with the effects of decades of domination as a part of the Soviet Union.

Opening witnesses – the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, William Taylor, and George Kent, the State Department’s top Ukraine official – described their arc of frustration, a growing realization over the summer that a Ukraine foreign-policy back channel centered on Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, was superseding their own traditional diplomatic efforts.

They were followed by a witness who spoke in personal terms about the power and effects of this back channel effort. Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, described how a “smear campaign” directed by Mr. Giuliani and others convinced President Trump to oust her early from her position.

Then, National Security Council Ukraine expert Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman connected the back channel to the White House. He listened to the now-famous July 25 phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and said publicly that he “did not think it was proper” for the U.S. president to demand that Ukraine investigate an American citizen.

Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, connected the dots and brought the back channel into the Oval Office.

There was a “quid pro quo,” Ambassador Sondland said – it was clear that Ukraine had to announce it was looking at former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, and the latter’s service on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma, if it wanted a prized White House visit for Mr. Zelenskiy.

Mr. Sondland said he presumed this stood for the release of U.S. military aid to Ukraine as well – though he was careful to say he had never heard that from President Trump on any of the many phone calls they had shared.

Dr. Hill, the Russia and Europe expert, concluded by placing the whole affair in a larger context. She described how she had come to understand that in regard to Ukraine, she had been working on national security policy. Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Sondland, and others involved in the separate irregular channel had been “involved in a domestic political errand,” she said.

She also predicted how the affair would progress.

“And I did say to him, Ambassador Sondland, ‘Gordon, I think this is all going to blow up.’ And here we are,” said Dr. Hill, who resigned her White House post July 19.

The national interest

One striking aspect of the testimony as a whole was its unity on the question of Ukraine and core U.S. national interest.

All who testified, including Mr. Sondland and special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, who had worked the back channel with Mr. Giuliani, made the case that the U.S. needs to give as much financial aid and moral support as possible to a new Ukrainian government struggling to eliminate corruption and uphold democracy in a very dangerous part of the world.

“It is a tragedy for the United States and for Ukraine that our efforts in this area, which were bearing fruit, have now been thrown into disarray,” testified Mr. Volker.

President Trump, in the testimony, comes across as the main and virtually sole person in the executive branch questioning the motives of President Zelenskiy, and Ukraine as a whole. He believes that they had tried to interfere in the 2016 election to defeat him, and that the country is corrupt to the bottom, according to testimony from Mr. Sondland. When officials presented a case in favor of Ukraine, the president waved his hand and said, impatiently, “Talk to Rudy,” Mr. Sondland said.

Another striking aspect of the hearing atmosphere was the extent to which Republican lawmakers defended President Trump by citing the allegations of Ukrainian interference in 2016.

They differed in this from the witnesses. Ranking minority member Devin Nunes of California, in his opening and closing statements, often invoked names that can be a mystery to those outside the conservative news bubble. Among them: Alexandra Chalupa, a Democratic National Committee consultant and former aide who in 2016 researched the activities of Paul Manafort, the now-jailed former Trump campaign chair, in Ukraine.

Dr. Hill pushed back, hard, against these allegations, saying that some have been pushed by Russian intelligence as a means of fomenting division between the U.S. and Ukraine, and within the U.S. It is not just that they are false, she said; it is that even on their face they add up to little compared with the massive interference effort undertaken by Russia itself.

“The impact of the successful 2016 Russian campaign remains evident today. Our nation is being torn apart,” Dr. Hill told the House Intelligence Committee.

Party lines

What do these public hearings mean for the nation? For one thing, they mean that the House is plummeting toward an impeachment vote that’s likely to be decided along purely partisan lines. No lawmakers have said publicly that they have changed their minds on impeachment one way or another as a result of what they’ve heard over the last two weeks.

This became clear when one of President Trump’s few Republican critics on the Intelligence panel, Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, announced that he would vote against impeachment. While Mr. Trump’s actions may have “undermined our national security,” he said, there remains no direct evidence of his intentions. The military aid was released; Ukrainian investigations into his political rivals have not begun.

“An impeachable offense should be compelling, overwhelmingly clear, and unambiguous,” said Representative Hurd.

A partisan split in the House may make it more likely that the Senate votes the same way in the trial it will hold if impeachment passes. If the Democrats can’t get Representative Hurd, who is retiring and free to speak his mind and vote his conscience, can they get Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah? That is the punditry question of the day.

It’s long been unlikely the Senate would muster the supermajority vote needed to remove President Trump from office. Now that seems more of a lock. Will a few GOP senators defect, resulting in a majority vote for removal that could be embarrassing for the president? Pending further twists in the case, that may now be unlikely.

In these splits, the chambers of Congress reflect the nation. When the public impeachment hearings began, President Trump’s approval rating was 41%, and his disapproval rating was 54.7%, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average of major polls. Two and a half weeks later, his approval rating is 41.9%, and disapproval 53.6%, according to FiveThirtyEight.

In other words, while dramatic testimony has gripped Washington and developments have been breathlessly promoted as positive or negative for the president, public opinion, so far, has stayed very close to the same.

Clepantine Magara started working as a doctor to make other people’s lives easier. And he stopped working as a doctor when the work made his own nearly impossible.

For months Dr. Magara had watched as his salary halved in value, and then halved again, as inflation in Zimbabwe charged into the triple digits.

So in early September, he joined hundreds of other junior doctors working in public hospitals in Zimbabwe and went on strike.

“Yes, it’s a calling, but without [the salary] it takes to do what you have to do, [that calling] is nothing,” says Dr. Magara, standing at the main entrance to Parirenyatwa Hospital, the country’s largest.

The doctors’ predicament looks a lot like their country’s. Inflation in Zimbabwe recently topped 300%, higher than any country in the world except Venezuela. The country is facing shortages of hard currency, fuel, medicine, and basic foods like bread. Meanwhile hope for political change, which had been recharged by the resignation of Robert Mugabe in November 2017, has gone flat.

But in that climate, Zimbabwe’s young doctors are testing a risky proposition: that change might still be possible if you ask for it loudly enough.

Their strike began in early September, when runaway inflation pushed the value of junior doctors’ wages to about $100 per month. The doctors – who are second-year interns – say they didn’t have the savings to subsidize the cost of working. Many were also deeply frustrated by widespread shortages of medicines and other basic supplies like needles, rubber gloves, and running water.

“It’s not only about the low salaries,” says Tapiwa Chagonda, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Johannesburg who studies how Zimbabwean workers survive in times of economic crisis. It’s also a matter of dignity for both doctors and patients. “They’ve signed up to the Hippocratic oath” to do no harm. “But there’s no working equipment, there aren’t basic drugs. In those conditions, how do you even begin to assist your patients?” he says.

Heavy consequences

On a recent Saturday outside Parirenyatwa – which was named for the first black Zimbabwean to qualify as a medical doctor – the parking lots were empty and still. Without its junior doctors, the hospital was running on a skeleton staff. Nurses and a few doctors tended to emergency cases. But most arrivals had to be turned away, or find their own way to receive treatment in the hospital’s ghostly wards.

Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP

Customers wait in line to withdraw cash from a bank in Harare, Zimbabwe, after the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe issued new banknotes, Nov. 12, 2019. The bank began issuing new notes and coins, aimed at easing crippling cash shortages amid runaway inflation.

Last month, Tendai Liwombo was one of them. When she found herself suddenly doubled over in pain one morning, her husband Prince Masawi rushed her to Parirenyatwa.

A nurse suspected she had an ectopic pregnancy, a life-threatening condition. From there, Ms. Liwombo spent hours bouncing between public and private hospitals across the city as her husband searched frantically – first for a facility with a working ultrasound machine, and then for a private anesthesiologist for the surgery.

When he found one, Mr. Masawi says, the man demanded $450, many times his monthly salary as a security guard. Frantic that he would lose his wife, Mr. Maswai thrust his cellphone into the man’s hand, begging him to take it as payment. At last, the doctor agreed to a payment of $50.

“The government should do something [to end the strike],” Ms. Liwombo says. She says she sympathizes with the doctors, whom she knows are living in the same harsh situation as she is, and doesn’t believe it is their responsibility to go back to work in these conditions. A month after her surgery, she is still in intense pain, and fears what will happen if she needs further medical care. “People are dying. Any further delay to my situation and it could have been a different story today.” 

Stories like these deeply trouble Dr. Magara, who says he dreamed of becoming a doctor since childhood “to save lives and to play a humanitarian role in society.” He knows his strike puts his patients’ lives on the line. But he reached a point, he says, where he could not afford to continue showing up to work.

The strike itself has also been dangerous. In September, Peter Magombeyi, one of the strike’s leaders, was abducted and tortured. Many suspect government involvement, though the government blames a “third force” wanting to destabilize Zimbabwe.

Promises of change

The strike, indeed, is a consequence of the country’s messy political transition.

When Emmerson Mnangagwa became president in November 2017 after ousting Mr. Mugabe, who had ruled the country since 1980, he vowed Zimbabwe was now “open for business.” On visits to foreign countries, and at the Davos World Economic Forum, he promised investors and donors a new dawn after decades of oppression and financial mismanagement under Mr. Mugabe.

Instead, his government violently put down protests, using the army to break up demonstrations and shooting live ammunition at protesters. This did little to win the confidence of the governments and companies Mr. Mnangagwa hoped to woo, and the country’s already-weak economy continued to backslide. Earlier this year, the country uncoupled its currency from the U.S. dollar, and inflation skyrocketed. The economy is now at its worst point since 2008, when annual inflation hit 89.7 sextillion percent.

As the value of their salaries dwindled, young doctors like Dr. Magara began hustling for other sources of revenue. Some became farmers. Others begged money off parents and relatives abroad to pay rent. Still others began seeing patients in private clinics, where they could charge enough to make up for their lost wages. 

“I had 100% confidence in Mnangagwa’s government when he took over in 2017, but it dwindled over time,” says Dr. Magara, who is currently living on money from family members.

Although the strike has so far failed to achieve its aims, it has drawn renewed international attention to Zimbabwe’s economic collapse. In late September, a global health summit in Boston named Zimbabwean first lady Auxillia Mnangagwa an “honorary ambassador” who would collaborate on “reducing healthcare disparities.” But a swift outcry, including from several former U.S. diplomats, quickly led the organization to distance itself from Ms. Mnangagwa. The honor, the diplomats wrote, gave tacit support to “an increasingly corrupt and abusive administration in which tolerance for dissent is nonexistent and democratic rights are violently denied.” 

Dr. Magara continues to hope the government will eventually come around to the doctors’ demands, which include a 400% raise and salaries pegged to the dollar. Strikers have rejected the government’s offer to boost salaries by 60%, and there is little indication they would offer more. More than 400 doctors have been dismissed, and the deputy minister of information has tweeted that the “money mongering” strikers will be blacklisted.

“This is sad for me and my colleagues,” says Dr. Magara. “There is a possibility that I might choose to jump off the bus and do something else [professionally]. But I have my patients at heart.”

Piroschka van de Wouw/Reuters

Protesters demand an immediate end to gas extraction at the Groningen field as they block a facility of Dutch gas production company NAM, in Farmsum, Netherlands, August 28, 2018.

Ger “Gerry” Warink remembers his first time. 

It was 1991 and he was in the restaurant at his family’s hotel, a handsome brick building in the center of this quiet provincial town. He heard the front doors start to rattle, normally a sign that a big truck was passing, but the road outside was empty. “It was a Sunday. I remember it well,” he says. 

It wasn’t a truck, it was an earthquake, caused by the extraction of natural gas from the surrounding flatlands of Groningen, the northernmost province in the Netherlands. It was one of hundreds of tremors that have for decades disturbed the lives of around 85,000 residents living on top of Europe’s largest onshore gas field, damaging their homes and depressing their businesses.

For more than half a century Groningen gas has heated Dutch homes, powered Dutch factories, and helped pay for one of Europe’s most generous welfare states. But now, under public pressure, the government is turning the tap off. The Groningen field is due to close in 2022, barring a winter crisis. Last year the Netherlands became a net importer of gas for the first time since the 1960s. 

Going green hits the budget ...

The decision to close the field was spurred by seismic risks to public safety, not climate change. But the move adds urgency to the search for more renewable energy resources, especially since the government aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 49% by 2030.

The closure is not without cost. The company operating the field, a joint venture between Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil known as NAM, employs 1,400 people and indirectly supports as many as 20,000 jobs, according to Groningen’s top executive, King’s Commissioner René Paas.

He is hopeful, though, that the gas industry can pivot toward renewable energy and convert its existing infrastructure to produce and distribute hydrogen. “This is a province that is really motivated to make the change from fossil fuels to a new kind of energy,” he says.

A crisis can also be an opportunity. For the Netherlands, that opportunity lies in building a new energy grid that by midcentury could replace a network powered by gas from Groningen. 

Since July 1, new buildings may no longer be heated by gas. Scores of houses in Loppersum are now being built to code with electric heat pumps. Energy efficiency grants are also available to retrofit older homes and to install solar panels. 

 “If the Netherlands isn’t capable of making this transition, no one else can. We have the (energy industry) expertise. We have the wealth,” says Joris Peijster, a former Shell engineer who quit last year to work on geothermal projects at a French energy company, hoping to be part of the solution to the global climate crisis.

And the policy shift is pricey. The decision to mothball the Groningen gas field is the most expensive decision a Dutch government will ever make short of war, Mr. Paas points out, since they are leaving as much as $80 billion worth of gas underground.

Leaving fossil fuels untouched is consistent, however, with the goals of climate activists who argue that oil-and-gas companies will need to do the same in order to avert global disaster

A 2015 study in Nature estimated that 50% of known natural gas reserves, and 80% of coal, would need to remain in the ground if the world is to limit global temperature rise to 2ºC.

Simon Montlake/The Christian Science Monitor

Ger Warink, a homeowner, points to cracks on his house in Loppersum, the Netherlands, that he blames on earthquakes linked to natural-gas exploration in Europe's largest onshore gas field in Groningen in the Netherlands.

... but the gas field hits local homes

Local residents, however, are less impressed by the Dutch government’s climate policy and its promise to shutter the Groningen field within three years than they are concerned with the pace and scope of its compensation program. Will their homes still be repaired and reinforced? Why are buildings previously rated as at-risk now off the danger list? And if gas revenues dry up, where will fresh money be found? 

Years of uncertainty and delays have sapped public trust in political promises, says Jacolien Masselink, a municipal official in charge of earthquake-related programs in Loppersum, the epicenter of the quakes. “Even the most reasonable people are angry.” 

Loppersum is less than three hours by train from Amsterdam and other big cities, but by Dutch standards this region is the boondocks, far from the country’s political and economic heartland.  

A sense of being peripheral added to the stress that residents felt when the tremors began to worsen, says Ms. Masselink. “They’re not used to standing up for themselves,” she says. 

In the Netherlands, landowners don’t retain mineral rights. So when gas was discovered here in 1959 by Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij (NAM), the Shell-Exxon joint venture, the Dutch state became a co-owner of the field. Since it came online in 1963, Groningen’s gas has pumped about $465 billion into government coffers.

Today, the gas field’s pumps, gauges, and pipes are largely hidden from view. The landscape is a rural idyll of farms and canals dotted with the occasional windmill. But in the 1980s came the first hints of trouble.

Local residents complained of ground subsidence, which was linked to the pumping of gas. Then came the tremors, the result of gas extraction from porous rock that contracts and increases the stress on natural faults in the low-lying region’s soft soils. Most of the quakes were shallow and small, below a magnitude of 2, but even when they began to strike more often and more strongly, NAM paid little heed.

Mr. Warink, a rock musician, bought his canal-side house in Loppersum in 1994. One half of its double front is a showroom for the guitars and amplifiers he sells when he’s not touring. The other serves as his living room. The sliding door that should separate it from his dining room hangs at an odd angle, one of several signs of damage that he has documented in multiple claims against NAM.  

Near his dining table he keeps a bulging folder of engineers’ reports, bank statements, and other NAM-related documents, packed in a silver flight case plastered with stickers from past tours. Ministers on fact-finding visits to Groningen have sat at his table and heard him out. But his folder of claims keeps growing.

“Politicians have lost the trust of the people here,” he complains. “Now they won’t believe anything they say.” 

He has also been sitting at his table when the ground moved, like an underground train passing. “Then I looked out there,” he says, gesturing at the backyard. “The trees were shaking.”

A deaf ear?

The seismic risks of underground mining and oil and gas drilling are widely known, though proving cause and effect can be difficult. In the United States, an increase in the number of earthquakes in Texas and Oklahoma has been attributed to fracking and the injection of wastewater. 

In 1993, NAM publicly accepted that gas extraction in Groningen could cause minor quakes and the company agreed to pay for repairs. “There was an acknowledgment that it could damage buildings, but was not a safety risk to the community” says Hein Dek, a spokesman for NAM.

Critics say the company knew the scale of the risks but did not take them seriously enough, abetted by governments that depended on the gas revenues. An especially violent quake measuring 3.4 struck in 2012 as the government ramped up production – to offset a financial recession and a cold winter – beyond a level that experts have since concluded is reasonably safe.

Mr. Peijster, the ex-Shell engineer, recalls how the company was mired in controversy over how to assess and compensate for damages when he joined NAM in 2013, but that it had little sense of how to handle disgruntled residents. Most of its staff were engineers and geologists, and few lived in the blighted towns and villages. 

“Nobody took into account how people felt. They missed that part of the story,” he says. 

The company was widely criticized for the bureaucratic torpor of its claims adjudication process. Last year the government took over responsibility for the program, seeking to speed up payouts. 

NAM has so far spent €2.7 billion (nearly $3 billion) on quake-related repairs, research, and reinforcement and has set aside €1.7 billion for future payouts that will continue after extraction ends at Groningen, says Mr. Dek. “We are in full support of the decision” to stop production, he says. 

No end in sight

Beneath the town hall where Ms. Masselink works are 101 pilings installed this year during a quake-proof retrofit that will end up costing taxpayers as much as the building cost to construct in the first place in 2007. Across the municipality 4,900 other buildings may also be at risk, but there’s no way of knowing without inspecting each one. So far, 341 have been reinforced or replaced. 

It’s hard to set priorities when there’s uncertainty over risk assessment and future funding, says Jurry Bonnema, the municipal director. He frets that compensation money could dry up if NAM shuts down its wells in 2022. “I think this is not the most wise decision,” he says. 

Taking the Groningen gas field offline will not remove the risk of tremors, though it might render them less frequent. The field is already operating at a reduced rate and still the ground buckles: In May, a 3.4-magnitude quake led to thousands of new damage claims.

In a region where the population was already falling, real-estate prices have taken a hit. In Loppersum, Mr. Bonnema says they fell as much as 15% following the 2012 quake. Lower house values mean lower tax revenues, squeezing municipalities already strained by the slow-moving crisis.

Back at his house, Mr. Warink lays out his options: Stay and reinforce, or sell and go. 

The property is worth no more than €400,000 ($440,000.) It would be cheaper for NAM to buy him out; ensuring that his floors and walls don’t crack after tremors would probably cost a million euros. But he’s not selling. “My wife doesn’t want to leave this house,” he says. 

And he understands her. “You have to make people feel safe,” he insists, “and you have to pay the costs.” 

This story was produced with support from an Energy Foundation grant to cover the environment.

When Rob Scheer and his husband Reece’s first adopted child arrived at their home, the 4-year-old’s world fit into a trash bag. The pink pajamas inside that bag had feet so tattered and worn, the material was nearly transparent. The Maryland couple took her shopping to get everything she would need to start her new life – including a pink robe. 

Rob Scheer recalls her wearing the robe with a big smile on her face. “I’ve never owned a new nightgown before,” he remembers her saying. The couple was disheartened to see that each of the four children they’ve adopted out of the foster care system arrived carrying toys and clothing in trash bags. “That trash bag just weighed so heavy on my heart,” Mr. Scheer says. 

The image cued a flashback: Having grown up in foster care himself, he once carried a similar bag moving into a new home. Mr. Scheer was troubled by the lack of dignity afforded to children in the U.S. foster system. He decided to act: Along with his husband, Mr. Scheer founded Comfort Cases in 2013.

Based in Rockville, the nonprofit provides children in the foster system with proper bags packed with essential and comforting items – shampoo, blankets, pajamas – that are sent to family services agencies across the United States. 

Comfort Cases are packed for various age ranges, and each includes an activity: a coloring book for those under 10, a journal and writing set for older children. To date, Comfort Cases has served more than 85,000 children in all 50 states, along with the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. 

“I understand that a Comfort Case isn’t going to make it all right,” Mr. Scheer says. “But it’s a step in the right direction.”

Valuables 

The idea began as an activity for the Scheers to teach their children about giving back around the holidays. They never thought that the self-funded service project would blossom into a nonprofit that has supported children across the country. The organization has distributed 62,000 Comfort Cases and an additional 25,000 “Comfort XLs” – larger duffel bags.

Phil Tavolacci and his husband, Jeff, of Silver Spring, Maryland, have fostered five children; some arrived in emergency situations. “Three of the children we had with us for short stays came with fully packed and beautiful Comfort Cases,” Mr. Tavolacci said in an email. He noted a “heightened level of self-worth” in the children who arrived with the special backpacks, versus those who came with their few belongings in a trash bag. 

Mr. Tavolacci, a physical therapist, recalls how one little girl loved the stuffed animal that came in her case, and several boys appreciated the blankets. “Comfort Cases is doing so much to help children in foster care to feel valued, and valuable, and loved,” he says.

Mr. Scheer’s dedication to the cause is born of his own childhood experience as the youngest of 10 children, living with an abusive father and a mother addicted to drugs. “I still have scars from where my father put a cigarette out on my legs, over and over,” he says.

After his parents died, Mr. Scheer wound up in foster care at the age of 12, carrying what few belongings he had in a trash bag. He distinctly remembers taking his first shower in his new home, with a bar of soap already used by a family he barely knew. “Those kinds of things that people don’t even think about weighed heavy for me,” says Mr. Scheer.

He remained in the system until his foster parents kicked him out at age 18. Despite being homeless, he finished high school and landed a minimum wage job. He eventually joined the Navy and later found a job at a bank, working his way up to an executive position. After a successful 25-year career, Mr. Scheer stepped down to dedicate his efforts to Comfort Cases and traveling the country to talk about the foster care system.

Courtesy of Joyce Smith/Comfort Cases

Comfort Cases has served more than 85,000 children in all 50 states. The bags are packed with essential and comforting items – shampoo, blankets, pajamas – that are sent to family services agencies across the U.S.

“Our kids”

When Twinbrook Baptist Church in Rockville closed its doors in August, it announced that proceeds from the building’s sale would benefit various organizations – including Comfort Cases. The Rev. Jill McCrory, the church’s former pastor, organized a packing party for the nonprofit as a service project. She was moved by the image of a child entering foster care with only a trash bag. 

“The anguish of being uprooted and entering a strange home, and being treated as if your belongings and you are trash, is something no child should have to experience,” she said in an email. “When you hear [Mr. Scheer] talk about his vision for foster care and these kids, you can hear his passion and his love. ... He truly wants to bring about enormous change and I believe he has the energy, heart and capacity to do it.”

Julie Holstein, a childhood friend of Mr. Scheer, works for the homeowners association for Broadlands, Virginia. When she was tasked with finding a volunteer opportunity for youth in the community, she thought of Comfort Cases. “We have a very affluent county,” says Ms. Holstein in an email. “Comfort Cases has provoked [in] our student population the thought that not everyone is as affluent as the next person, and sometimes a little bit of kindness goes a long way.” 

Ms. Holstein first met Mr. Scheer when the two were in middle school. They had friends in common, and were in touch occasionally over the years. But it wasn’t until she learned about Comfort Cases that she fully understood her friend’s upbringing. “I was stunned to find out I basically knew nothing about him,” she says.

She finds inspiration in Mr. Scheer’s efforts to transform a negative experience into a means of helping others. “Not only did Rob choose to do something positive with his life experience, he’s motivating others to consider someone other than themselves,” Ms. Holstein says. 

With only four employees, Comfort Cases is largely run by volunteers. Mr. Scheer hopes that learning about the realities of the foster care system and the struggles that children inside it face will encourage more individuals to help.

“We think these are bad kids, and forgotten kids and invisible kids,” he says.“But in the end, they are your kids, they are my kids, they are our kids. The kids don’t belong to the system – they belong to us.”