Love Makes a Family

Our Goals

The Goals of Foster Care Aware are Three-Fold.

Awareness: To raise awareness about foster care and the need for emotionally intelligent foster parents.

Encourage: To encourage community members to support the kid’s in their community by supporting friends who want to foster, becoming volunteers, donating, advocating, or becoming foster parents themselves.

Connect: To connect prospective foster folks with local agencies and training programs, volunteers with organizations, and people who care about the kids in our cities who want to be an active part of the solution with others who do too.

The Facts

1 in 3 families consider adoption but only 2% actually adopt.

What would happen if more people knew about the need for quality families for children in the foster care system?

How would these numbers shift if more people understood the preschool to prison pipeline and how they can could help stop it?

How much easier would it be for families to say yes if their friends and family had the tools to support them?

This is the data we’re tracking with Foster Care Aware.

(Source: Jahng, Kenny. “Adoption Awareness: 10 Facts about Adoption That Will Surprise You.” The Adoption Journey. June 17, 2012.)

What is FCA?

Foster Care Aware is More than a Messaging Movement, it’s an Experiment.

Our hypothesis is that if more people knew about the need in our communities, understood the problem, and were clear on the different ways they could get involved, they would.

We believe that people care, but, right now, they’re just not aware.

Help us spread the word (don’t worry- we’ve written all the words for you!) by sharing with your community through email and social media to help us raise friends + funds.

Reunification

The goal of Foster Care is always Reunification first

Family reunification is the process of returning a child to his or her family of origin following a placement in foster care. In Virginia, reunification is the primary goal for children in foster care. Research finds that children do best when raised in their own families, whenever possible. In order to successfully achieve reunification, challenges associated with the birth parents must be thoroughly addressed as the child's safety and well-being are paramount. This requires the support of the child welfare professionals and the child's foster parents.

Strong partnerships between birth parents, foster parents, local departments of social services, courts and other community partners are critical to achieving successful reunification and stability for children. Foster parents play a critical role in helping to involve birth families in case planning and decision-making, providing mentoring support of birth parents, and facilitating visits between children and their biological families.

Approximately one-third of children exiting foster care each year return to their parents' custody. Other outcomes include adoption, the transfer of custody to a relative, and emancipation (or aging out of foster care with no identified family).

(Source: Virginia Dept of Social Services)