Our Approach

What do these children need?

Children in foster care are often at a tremendous disadvantage when it comes to life skills and growth in comparison to children who remain with their family of origin. This is the challenge that Fostering Hope takes on and we do so by giving the children and their families the three essentials to success:  Stability, Enrichment, Connection.

Stability

  • Decrease stress to a reasonable, healthy level within the household.
  • Ensure a clear, consistent, and predictable life pattern.
  • Limiting – even preventing — transfers from home to home.
  • Living with routines, rules, and disciplinary practices until they become habit.

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 the child’s 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.
  • Identify and develop friends who will provide a support system that gives “hands up” assistance once the child has aged-out of the system.

Fostering Hope helps to meet this need by:

  • Reducing stress, burnout 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.