What Is A Foster Friendly Community?
Foster Friendly Communities is a people-centric community initiative designed to create conditions where foster families and kids thrive. These communities activate businesses, faith communities, nonprofits and elected officals, and connect them with families via our open-source Foster Friendly App.
Foster Friendly launched in Jacksonville in 2023 under leadership and seed funding provided through The Church of Eleven22.. Changes in the church’s missional priorities and in local leadership for the Foster Friendly program led to a pause in the program.
The initiative successfully attracted close to 200 area businesses and five faith communities, in addition to national offers, to support local foster and kinship families, honoring them the same way we honor our military families.
Our goal is to secure funding and leadership support to renew the Jacksonville Foster Friendly Community initiative. Until we do America’s Kids Belong is committed to continue to make these offers available to foster and kinship families,
Help Make Jacksonville A Foster Friendly Community
How A Foster Friendly Community™ Helps Foster Families Thrive
Here are a few examples from the family’s story (above).
Someone dropped off a 15-passenger van for them to use while caring for the sibling group.
A WRAP team organized, prepared and delivered meals.
Friends took the kids shopping, to the movies and to the park.
Neighbors showed up to help rock babies, clean bathrooms and mow the yard.
Foster Friendly communities involve local municipal leaders, businesses, faith communities and nonprofits saying yes to supporting their amazing friends and neighbors who provide kinship and foster care. Together a community’s support lightens the load for foster parents of caring for traumatized kids (on a moment’s notice) and makes it more likely that they’ll continue saying yes, knowing they’re not alone.
Caring for Kids In Foster Care Is A Responsibility We All Share
It’s impossible to understate the effect on a child of aging out of foster care without a family…and on the adult they will become.
The lifelong adverse effects are wide-ranging and staggering. Foster care is a “root cause” of many of society’s deepest social wounds.
Behind these worrisome outcomes are hurting, vulnerable kids, who as young adults find themselves in hard places through no fault of their own. Every one of them has a name, a story, hopes and dreams – most of which will remain unfulfilled if no one stands in the gap to provide a stable home environment and family.
The challenges of today’s foster care system ripple into the vitality of our communities as a whole. Every child who ages out of foster care without a family will incur hundreds of thousands in social services over a lifetime. And that’s just the tangible costs.
Every child deserves the opportunity to reach their full potential.
Why Kids Aging Out Of Foster Care With Families Is An Urgent Community Crisis
Age out of the U.S. foster
care system each year
Lifetime social-service cost
per child