Community Blog Archives by Date Blog
With May being Foster Care Awareness Month, we’re bringing families in our community together to help us raise awareness for foster care all month! We’re partnering with Family First and their programs, All Pro Dad and iMOM to participate in a 5K for Foster Kids, and we want to invite your family to participate!
There’s a desperate need for teen foster families. Unfortunately, many people feel like teens in foster care are a “bigger challenge” than younger kids. Due to many stereotypes and assumptions, people are more willing to take in younger kids, which leads to heartbreaking stories of teens who have no place to go, who get stuck in the system. Learn about what they want you to know.
April is Child Abuse Prevention Month and everyone has a part to making great childhoods happen. Learn about how you can support happy + healthy childhoods happen.
My wife, Joy-Lynn and I became Foster Parent Mentors (FPM) through Heartland for Children in 2012. When we were approached with the opportunity to be an added support for incoming Foster Parents, we jumped at the opportunity because we saw the value in having someone who other Foster Parents could relate to as being an invaluable resource; especially, if the individual(s) were completely new to the fostering and/or parenting experience.
As FPMs through Heartland, we've had the chance to interact with incoming Foster Parents on many levels including assisting with respite, providing guidance or best practices with difficult behavioral issues, advocating for a child who had to be moved from one home to another, making recommendations on working with case management, providing another vantage point through the process of Termination of Parental Rights (TPR), and many other areas that Foster Parents can encounter during their first and continuing years of child advocates.
What we've gained as FPMs is a heightened level of understanding of how important it is to identify the needs of incoming Foster Parents. Being able to make recommendations on how the training component has and can continue to successfully equip incoming parents with the proper training and education; is a value add that Heartland has really welcomed input on.
Cebien Alty - HFC Foster Parent, Foster Parent Mentor