Connecting Prospective Foster Parents to Foster Care Professionals
The highlighted categories in the table above are racial demographics overrepresented in the foster kid population. This signals that there needs to be a change in how foster care is managed.
Fortunately, the Social Work community and all US States (that we have spoken to) generally agree on solution steps like reducing child poverty, emphasizing kinship care, relating to culture, and diligent foster parent recruiting can help meet the challenge.
As we celebrate 2023 May National Foster Care month, here is the latest publicly available data. In 2021, an estimated 391,098 children were in foster care in the United States. This number has been steadily declining in recent years, but there is still a significant number of children living without a permanent home. See AFCARS report #29 from November 2022 and the summary screenshot below.
May is National Foster Care Month. And this year the focus is on kinship care and reunion with bio families (biological or birth families) where possible. Kinship This post explores the idea that neighbors can be considered as kin for the purposes of “keeping families together.”
Mother’s Day on the second Sunday in May coincides with the National Foster Care Month. This year it is on Sunday May 8, 2022. So it’s timely to think of ways how everyone can celebrate Mother’s Day in the Foster Care ecosystem by saying “I love you.” But first some background.
We had a very successful first virtual meeting on May 19, 2021 between prospective foster parents and foster care professionals. Some of the parents had a lot of knowledge about foster parenting and had new questions that sparked spirited discussion. One of the questions was between authoritative and authoritarian parenting.
It’s easy to imagine that a child who goes into foster care is different from a child who is in a normal stable biological family home. Just because of the instability at home. A trivial example, that our kind reader would recognize, is that a predictable cup of coffee in the morning gives a lot of comfort . Drinking a cup of coffee from a favorite cup adds to comfort, some of our friends tell us. Contrast such mundane comforts to the needs of traditional vs. therapeutic foster kids.
We started with some agencies to support their recruiting efforts digitally. Face-to-Face methods continued like open houses at the organization, a table at Community events. Advertising spending continued on offline methods but it was clear that digital marketing was effective both by cost and results. And then there was the COVID pandemic since March 2020Continue reading “Why StartFosterCare.Org? Our Story..”