This month's edition of
Foster Care Footnotes
is one that we encourage you to share with your Foster Parent Champions or others who help support your recruitment and retention efforts.
While we look forward to training another amazing group of Foster Parent Champions (stay tuned for details), we thought we’d check in with the Champions that are already hard at work recruiting and retaining foster parents around the state.
We had the honor of hearing from several Champions during a recent brainstorming session hosted by the Coalition. Brainstorms are all about YOU sharing your biggest challenges as well as your successes.
Here’s a sample of the innovative and successful recruitment activities Champions have been involved in:
- County-produced stickers with information about fostering are being placed on pizza boxes at a pizzeria owned by a foster family, as well as on pie boxes by a local bakery.
- A pastor’s message about the importance of being involved in efforts like foster care, as well as a table in the church foyer, resulted in eight families signing up for an information session.
We also shared retention activities:
- A local hair styling academy has 10 students who donate their time and provide free haircuts to foster families around back-to-school time as well as at holidays.
- An organization called “Once Upon a Child” donated items to a local county agency. The agency then displayed all the items on tables for foster families to come and “shop” for whatever they needed, at no cost to the families.
Congratulations on the excellent efforts of our current Foster Parent Champions! We look forward to more brainstorm sessions in the future and invite you all to join in. Meanwhile, keep up the amazing work!
