Our 2025 Goal: Hope in Every Home
Broken. Messed up. Terrible. Hopeless. All of these words are frequently used to describe the child welfare system by people involved at every stage of the process:
Birth parents who feel unjustly targeted.
Foster parents who feel jerked around and underappreciated.
Kids who have been let down way too many times by adults who are supposed to care for them.
Professionals who are underpaid, under-resourced, overworked, and frequently criticized.
As a private foster care and adoption agency, The Salvation Army Children's Services is fully immersed in this broken system, seeking to bring the light of hope to the darkness of the child welfare system in everything that we do. The Salvation Army's co-founder, Catherine Booth, said, "There is no reward equal to that of doing the most good to the most people in the most need."
The child welfare system certainly encompasses the people in the most need in our communities. And yet it's certainly true that the system is broken - not because people don't care or aren't working hard enough, but because the problems are incredibly complex and there are never enough resources to help. So what does "doing the most good" look like within this broken system?
In 2025, our program will be rallying around the idea of "Hope in Every Home."
As a program, we care deeply about families who foster and adopt and the children that come into their homes. We want to equip these families and support them to the absolute best of our abilities, but we don't want the hope to end with them.
Rather, we are passionate about restoring hope to every home:
- Hope to struggling families who are desperate to avoid losing their children to foster care
- Hope to separated families working hard to stabilize and reunify
- Hope to birth parents after their children have been adopted - to be treated with dignity, respect, and love and remain a part of their children's lives if they desire to do so
- Hope to newly reunified families who are vulnerable and need support
- Hope to older youth who may never find a forever family but still need loving support to launch into adulthood
- Hope to children and youth who are struggling to remain safely in a home due to their trauma
- Hope to exhausted and overwhelmed foster parents who are wondering if they can keep going
- Hope to hopeful foster or adoptive parents waiting to be matched with a child
- Hope to waiting children hoping to be matched with a family
- Hope to child welfare staff who work long hours and come home exhausted but still have their own families to care for at home
- Hope to volunteers who are looking for meaningful ways to connect and serve their community
We would love for you to join us in this mission of hope in 2025. Likewise, if we can help to bring a dose of hope to your home, we sincerely hope that you will contact us! If you are within our service area of 60 miles from Allentown, PA, we would be happy to help you with:
- Providing post-adoption services and support
- Providing trauma-informed trainings for parents and caregivers (virtual trainings are open even to those outside of our service area)
- Providing meaningful volunteer opportunities as part of a Care Community, the HALO Project, Rock N Run, and more
- Working with your family to become licensed to foster and/or adopt, if you would like to join us on our mission of hope!
Throughout the coming year, we will be providing you with more opportunities to help bring hope to every home. Stay tuned and be sure to follow us on social media as well as reading our monthly newsletters to find out more. In the meantime, we would like to cordially invite you to an upcoming event on Thursday, February 13 from 6-7:30 pm at Faith Church in Allentown. Faith Church is generously partnering with our program to host this "Dessert and Discussion" event to raise awareness about foster care and adoption in our community, and introduce you to several foster/adoptive families who will be sharing their stories. It will be an encouraging and uplifting evening - and hopefully send you home with a little dose of hope!
Please register directly through Faith Church here.
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