Foster Care and the Church

May is National Foster Care Awareness Month – the time of year when the spotlight shines on the plight of neglected and abused children. There are more than 6,000 foster children in the 11 counties of the San Francisco Bay area.

A child enters foster care when a report of abuse or neglect within their own home is substantiated by Child Protective Services. Thirty-four percent of these children go to live with relatives, but 20% of California’s foster children are forced to move out of the county where they have been residing because there are not enough homes available nearby. This leads to further disruptions for them as they change schools and adapt to unfamiliar neighborhoods sometimes hundreds of miles away. (It is not unheard of for a child from the Bay Area to move to a foster home in Southern California.) On top of that, many foster children experience multiple changes in their living situations. While the average stay in foster care is eighteen months, for those children who are in care for two or more years, 44% move three times and 15% move five times.

Increasing the number of available foster homes locally is one way to address the need but recruiting foster parents can be challenging.  “With more children entering into care than families to provide it, we’re in a crisis,” says Ellie Egles, Director of Care and Support at Foster the Bay. 

Foster the Bay is a coalition of 150 churches throughout the Bay area committed to not only finding homes for foster children, but supporting those families providing care. “Our model draws from the very essence of what the church should be – a community providing tangible, spiritual, and emotional support,” Ellie explains.

Churches in the Foster the Bay coalition raise up at least one foster family and a group of support friends to come alongside the family. “It’s actually really difficult to be a foster parent,” says Ellie who along with her husband has provided care in their home for three children. “This is physically, emotionally, and spiritually demanding. 60% of foster families drop out after the first year or the first placement. So rather than tell a foster family, you have to do this on your own, we ask three or four support friends to walk through this journey together with them.”

A church for every child

Since it was established 5 ½ years ago, Foster the Bay has worked with church leaders to recruit foster families, advocates, and support friends. They also provide resources, trainings, and tools to inform and encourage participation. Ellie confirms, “It’s not just a foster family saying yes and welcoming a child; it’s the whole church saying yes.”

Foster the Bay connects churches to a number of other organizations that provide training, conferences, and camps like Help One Child which gives the church the opportunity to wrap around foster families as an educated village. The goal is to support placement stability and health.

“Help One Child is very committed to education,” says Executive Director, Valerie Crane. “But if you’re never exposed to what foster care is, it remains this mystical thing. We talk to the church about who’s involved in foster care and what it looks like. We break down stigmas. It’s an impactful way to equip the church to better love the foster families that are stepping forward.”

The education is on-going. Help One Child circles back at three months, six months, and even a year later with more information. Once a month they host a therapist for foster parents. They also provide a quarterly seminars.  “Our staff is constantly sitting beneath great teaching. It’s our job to make it palatable for the church volunteers as well as the caregivers,” says Valerie. “If we can educate a community to better understand what’s going on in a child’s brain and to better understand what’s going on in a household, they’re going to be a valuable support.”

A team effort

Help One Child currently partners with 85 churches in the Bay Area, but opportunities for engagement vary. Some churches sponsor annual donation drives to collect Christmas gifts for foster kids, equip a new foster family, or send a child to camp. Others host events for foster and adoptive families.

Churches interested in providing for some very real needs can use the online platform, CarePortal. Help One Child is the regional manager for CarePortal and collaborates with the child welfare workers in local counties to uncover needs and make churches aware of how to respond. Valerie says, “It’s a super simple way for people to respond to tangible needs like a family needing a crib for a new placement.”

A personal impact

Valerie first became involved with foster care as a Help One Child Supper Club volunteer teaching teens in group homes how to prepare food. She and her husband are foster parents who to date have cared for seven children. They adopted Child #6. 

Supper Club volunteers plan a meal they then prepare with kids in the residence. It’s gives the staff and the kids a break from the regular dinner time routine and helps the teens develop relational skills. “You don’t need a lot of training to teach someone how to cook pasta,” says Valerie. ”But if you’re signing up for Supper Club, we’re going to take a moment and unpack for you what these teens’ lives might look like. We’ll bring you up to speed on what’s appropriate and what’s not so that you can be better equipped to serve them.”

Camp is another way church members can interact with foster kids. Help One Child’s Signs of Hope camp unites 7-11 year-old foster and adopted children together at Mission Springs’ Frontier Ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains at the end of the summer. The benefits are enormous, not only to the campers, but to the counselors as Valerie says, “The number of camp counselors who become foster parents is pretty high.”

In Sonoma County, Royal Family Kids sponsors a 5-day camp for foster kids, ages 6 – 12, who reside in the county. There’s also a three-day camp for teens called TRAC. Volunteer counselors are recruited from local churches. “This is a very unique ministry,” says Director Tom Griffith. “We directly partner with churches locally, but with the heightened oversight of caring for foster kids, we require an application process for our volunteers.”

In a typical year 110 volunteers serve the 70 children who attend the camp. Each volunteer completes up to 16 hours of training. Tom explains the process, “It takes about 6 months to raise a team from recruiting within the churches, through applications, interviews, and background checks through training and final prep leading up to camp,”

Royal Family Kids is a national organization with two hundred chapters around the country. Locally RFK partners with six churches in Sonoma County. Sadly the organization has faced some challenges in the past few years. Wildfires followed by the pandemic shut down the mentoring club program, but there is hope it can restart in the not-to-distant future.

A call to the church

According to the California Department of Social Services reports of suspected child abuse in the state of California dropped 28% during the height of the pandemic, but with schools re-opening and teachers the most common reporters of abuse and neglect, it is likely the number of children in need of foster care will increase significantly soon.

Child Protective Services is eager to work with local churches to recruit and support foster parents. With the support of organizations like Foster the Bay and Help One Child more churches can step up and respond to the need.  As Valerie says, “in order for us to really make a difference, we all need to have more compassion, which means more understanding of what these children have gone through and what their parents  -- bio and foster -- have gone through. It just can’t be somebody else’s problem. If we can step in and be the church to these kids we’d be making some pretty bold statements about the love of Christ.”