Fostering Hope Foundation

Program Impacts

Our Desired Result: to affirm and support foster parents in their task of caring for neglected and abused children.



What do these Children need?

Stability

  • A clear, consistent, and predictable life pattern.
  • Have fewer transfers from home to home.
  • Increase length of time with the same foster parents.
  • Live with the same routines, rules, and disciplinary practices until they are habitual.
  • Reasonable and healthy stress levels within the household.

Enriched Environment

  • Increase the healthy and productive relationships in a child's life.
  • Have activities and experiences that are typical of functional families.
  • Relate to caring, dependable adults who have their best interests at heart.
  • Competent adults to help develop the knowledge, experience, and skill needed to be successful in life. Adults and peers who believe in the child and make his or her future possible.

Community Connection

  • Develop healthy adult and peer networks within the civic community.
  • Build relationships with future mentors, friends and advisors.
  • Friends who will provide support and "hands up" assistance once aged-out.

Fostering Hope Program accomplishes these benefits for foster families by:

  • Reducing stress, burn-out and turnover among foster parents.
  • Build relationships with future mentors, friends and advisors.
  • Increasing the resources (people, time, goods, etc.) available to foster parents and children.
  • Creating supportive relationships for children outside of their foster and biological families.
  • Creating awareness of foster parenting and the needs of foster children among faith and civic communities.
  • Increasing the number of foster parents by making fostering less daunting.

The results? This is what foster parents, volunteers, child placement agencies, and pastors have found:

  • They have seen the real differences the teams have made in foster families:
    • Stress levels are significantly reduced among the foster parents.
    • Foster families can take and keep sibling groups together with the help of teams.
    • With the support of a team, foster parents are persisting and continue working with extremely challenging children.
    • The volunteers support foster parents through crises with foster children and minimize the disruption in the foster home.
  • Foster parents give their enthusiastic support to the program. They use the teams to provide enriched educational, recreational, and social activities for the children, including transporting children to appointments, take them camping and horseback riding, help them job hunt and purchase gifts and needed clothing or supplies.
  • Foster parents experience social support from the teams. Foster parents tend to be somewhat isolated socially, because their lifestyle makes it difficult to interact with their friends, or their neighbors may be suspicious and are often concerned about the children they bring into the neighborhood. The teams ease the loneliness they experience.
  • The volunteers remain enthusiastic and report high levels of satisfaction and personal growth.
  • The foster children respond to the volunteers and engage in activities with them. Most have asked: "Why do these people care about us?" Many have bonded with the volunteers.
  • Finding, training, and teaming volunteers and matching them with foster families have become relatively simple and natural. Volunteers feel like "extended family" for the foster family.
  • Congregations are increasingly committed to the program with the strong support of their pastors. Volunteers frequently ask their congregations for additional volunteers, or clothing, school supplies and funding for the children.