Homeless at 16, crowned at 20: meet Ariana Rodriguez, Miss Kentucky
- Laurel Swanz
- 7 hours ago
- 7 min read
“Your new Miss Kentucky is…”
A moment of heavy silence.
Head down, all 20-year-old Ariana Rodriguez can see is her trembling hands intertwined with her fellow finalist’s and the stage lights reflecting off the golden gemstones covering her satin gown.
“Ariana Rodriguez, Bardstown!” the announcer said.
Cheers erupt from all around her. In a whirlwind, she’s being hugged by other contestants as she mouths “oh my gosh,” the tears already beginning to fall. A sash is draped over her shoulder and a silver crown is placed atop her head. She repeatedly touches it in disbelief.
“I blacked out, I was just in shock,” Rodriguez said.
This was a moment Rodriguez said she never would have imagined possible when she was 12 years old and placed in foster care, or when she was 16 and homeless, living out of her car.
Rodriguez was not always a pageant queen. The first foster care alum to win Miss Kentucky, she grew up in poverty, with a mother addicted to drugs and an abusive stepfather.
Fighting addiction, her mother struggled to show up as a parent for Rodriguez and her two siblings. Rodriguez said she spent the majority of her childhood in and out of around 12 different kinship homes, where kids unable to live with their parents are placed with close relatives or friends.
Kinship care was not sustainable long-term, though. Rodriguez said that her kinship caretakers were not paid and had to go through the court system, so not everyone was willing to help.
“Kinship care, even if they are relatives…it just feels like you’re a burden all the time because you’re in someone else’s home,” Rodriguez said. “I knew they weren’t getting financial support, so I kind of felt bad in that sense, like I was taking away from their other kids.”
Rodriquez frequently lived with her grandma, but she had to take out loans to put food on the table for them. Around Rodriguez’s 12th birthday, her family had run out of options, and she said she and her brother were no longer safe living with their mother and stepfather.
“My sister’s dad was abusing my brother and I. The court ordered that we needed to be taken out of the home due to neglect in the home,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez was placed in the foster care system. She was handed a trash bag to put her belongings in, moved into a stranger’s home and told she was “one of the lucky ones.”
She didn’t feel lucky. She felt voiceless.
“The system doesn't listen to kids. I was in foster care and kinship care combined for like, the majority of my life. I think, up to 14 years, I've been in the court system,” Rodriguez said. “I only talked to a judge once. Nobody asked me ever, like, ‘What do you think we should do?’ They don't ask the kids, yet they're making decisions about the kids' lives.”
After nearly two years in foster care, Rodriguez was reunified with her mother, who was no longer living with her former stepfather. However, her mother wasn’t necessarily living in conditions suitable for children, either.
“We lived out of an abandoned house. It was my mom, my brother and my sister. My mom was working all the time, but it just wasn't enough,” Rodriguez said. “With her trying to take care of three kids and a puppy, it just wasn't enough money. And so we were just homeless my entire eighth-grade year.”
The whole time they lived in the abandoned house, she said her family had no access to heat, water, air conditioning or electricity. She got out as soon as she could.
And at 16, faced with circumstances that limited her education and the future she wanted to build, Rodriguez made the decision to begin living out of the car she bought from her mother.
“I had made a promise prior to my brother and sister saying that I wouldn't put them in the foster care system again, so I could have reached out for help, but that is why I chose not to,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez went to school during the day and worked a part-time fast food job on evenings and weekends to save up for college, like many other juniors and seniors at Thomas Nelson High School. But unlike them, she had nowhere to go home each evening, either parking her car at the Nelson County Fairgrounds to sleep or staying with friends when possible.
Needing to depend on others often weighed on her relationships, and she said she lost some friends after conflicts arose from living with them, making her feel even more isolated.
“I'd already been pretty much abandoned by any family I’d had, and so I really relied on my friends,” Rodriguez said. “So to literally have nothing and have that one thing that I did have taken away from me, and it being out of my control was just so difficult.”
She recalled a moment of breakdown that marked a turning point in her life.
“I vividly remember going in my car and just like, punching my steering wheel. I was so mad, and I just started crying. I was like, ‘I'm just giving up.’ None of this is worth it. I've tried everything,” Rodriguez said. “So I just remember trying to pull down my mirror. I just kept looking at myself like, ‘You're not gonna be another statistic. You're gonna get through it.’ And that's the only reason I'm here.”
From then on, Rodriguez repeated this mantra of self-preservation nearly every day. Even with statistics like “3% of foster alumni will complete a bachelor’s degree” echoing in her mind, Rodriguez held onto the enduring belief that she was meant for more than what was expected of her.
“It was one of the best and worst times in my life, because I realized I couldn't rely on other people or other tangible things for happiness,” Rodriguez said. “It's a cliche, but you can choose to be happy. And so at that point in my life, I realized, you know, I can make myself happy. Despite my circumstances, I can still do things that I love. If I have no money, if I have no family or friends, like, all I have is my car and my dreams.”
Rodriguez thought about the thing she’d loved to do her whole life — singing — and how she could use it to make her dream of reforming the foster care system come true. In 2023, during her senior year, she searched online for talent competitions, hoping to win some money to pay for college.
She came across the Miss My Old Kentucky Home Scholarship Competition, a preliminary competition to Miss Kentucky. She said she spent all of the money she had saved for college on the entry fee and buying a dress.
“I was like, OK, I’m gonna go to Miss Kentucky’s Teen, and I’m gonna win, and then I’m gonna go to Miss America’s Teen and all my debt for college will be paid!” Rodriguez said. “I had clothes that didn't fit me. I had no idea what I was doing.”
She lost. Discouraged, she walked off stage crying. The pageant director came up to her to see what was wrong.
“I told her the whole story, and we sat down and talked, and she was like, ‘If you want to go to Miss Kentucky’s Teen, we're gonna get you there,’” Rodriguez said.
The two worked together to create a fundraising page that shared Rodriguez’s story, gaining enough traction to fund pageant training and more competitions.
Rodriguez said she has since earned thousands of dollars from the Miss America organization, winning Miss Bardstown in 2024 and Miss Kentucky in June 2025. She is now on track to graduate debt-free from the University of Kentucky, majoring in psychology and social work.
In February 2024, she was able to officially start her nonprofit, the Lucky Ones Foundation, at UK—something she’d envisioned since age 12.
The Lucky Ones offers support and resources to youth in foster care in Kentucky, spreads awareness of some of the system’s shortcomings and amplifies the voices of alumni. Rodriguez said they provide suitcases, prom dresses, birthday and Christmas gifts, driving lessons and more to foster youth.
The non-profit also helps foster youth transition to adulthood with an online series teaching them how to do laundry, change a tire and other helpful life skills.
“You're not taught life skills when you’re in foster care. You're not told how to do your taxes or how to apply for college or even like simple things, like how to manage your emotions, how to shave your legs,” Rodriguez said. “Because typically, I feel like foster parents think that, ‘oh, the last person taught them that,’ and then it just kind of goes untaught.”
Rodriguez also hosts the Lucky Ones Podcast, where foster care alumni can share their experiences. Winning Miss Kentucky has grown her platform significantly, bringing more attention to her mission and allowing Rodriguez to dream even bigger.
“My overall goal is to run an independent living facility for kids who age out of school,” Rodriguez said. “We actually found someone who said that he was willing to fund the housing for that, so we would be able to build houses for kids who age out of foster care. I would run it as a transition period between foster care and real life.”
For now, though, she needs to focus on being Miss Kentucky, and that’s no small task. But nothing feels better than knowing what holding this title means to other foster kids.
“That's been my favorite part, is just you have a national stage to not only wear the crown and sash, but to represent the things that you care about,” Rodriguez said. “This little girl, she came up to me, and she’s in foster care, and she said, ‘I’m so glad you won. I didn’t know people like us could do things like that.’ I literally just started bawling. It was so sweet.”
Sharing her story with the world has been deeply vulnerable for Rodriguez and her family. She said she’s gotten a lot of hate, including people accusing her of fabricating her past or claiming she only won Miss Kentucky because of it.
“Mostly I just laugh because, I mean, I've went through much worse than people telling me that I can't do something my entire life,” Rodriguez said.
For most of her life, Rodriguez said she didn’t feel like one of the lucky ones, so she stopped waiting around for luck and made her own.
“This is my mission, and if I don't fix it, nobody else is going to,” Rodriguez said. “So if people make fun of me, that's fine, because if I were to just be able to help one person, I think it would be all worth it.”
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