National Foster Care Month
May is National Foster Care Month. In honoring this month, there is so much to do and not nearly enough time to do it. One of the best ways to tackle a big undertaking is to make a “to do” list and make sure we stay on track and leave nothing undone. Let’s take a look at our National Foster Care Month to do list and make sure we haven’t missed anything:
- Support the Children – With nearly 400,000 children in foster care in the United States, supporting them takes resources. Those resources have proven to be in short supply. There are never enough foster families, there are never enough available therapists and specialists, there are never enough caseworkers, and there is never nearly enough funding. Our community can help by volunteering, donating, advocating for more financial support, and by stepping forward to become foster parents.
- Nurture the Biological Parents – Children enter foster care because their parents struggle with issues that prevent them from keeping the children safe. For every child in foster care, there is at least one wounded parent who desperately needs support and care themselves. The best outcome for a child’s time in foster care is to be able to be reunified with their biological family who has gotten the help they need to be able to provide a safe, loving, stable home. To nurture biological parents, our community can volunteer with nonprofits that provide social services, drug and alcohol treatment, anti-poverty measures, and mental health support. We can also advocate for more funding for these services and for a better social safety net.
- Bolster Up the Caseworkers – Being a worker within the child welfare system is a hard job. Caseworkers work long and varied hours, need to manage situations that are unpredictable, emotional, and sometimes unsafe. They are underpaid and their hearts are broken over and over again by the things they see and hear. When our community volunteers with us, opens their homes for fostering, donates and advocates for more resources, they are helping us help others. We can’t do it alone.
- Value the Foster Families – In 2023, we turned away nearly 1,000 children who were referred to us for foster care. There just weren’t families for them. There are never enough families. To say we’re immensely grateful to the families who have stepped forward to foster is woefully understating the emotions that come from knowing that we’re able to wrap around a frightened child and give them a place to begin to heal. Though foster families take on the burden of another family’s grief and loss, they also experience the joy of seeing a child thrive under their care. They are living examples of faith: they offer their love and their homes to unknown children for an unknown length of time, choosing protecting children over protecting their own hearts. They are unsung heroes in our communities. We can value them by asking then what they need to care for their foster children and themselves and finding a way to fill that need. Among other things, foster families benefit from help with meals, chores, transportation of children, babysitting, prayer, and someone to talk to. And if our hearts are leading us there, we can join them and open our homes as well.
Let’s make this National Foster Care Month a time to take action. It’s time for our whole community to step into the world of foster care and bring the support that lifts some of the burden to make more room for the joy.
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