The role of agency workers can be challenging as they juggle the demands of heavy caseloads and long hours. Workers often feel the physical and emotional strain that comes from caring deeply for the people they serve. Seeing trauma and navigating hard decisions daily takes its toll—a toll that isn’t meant to be carried alone.
AGENCY WORKERS • FOSTER PARENTS • VULNERABLE ADULTS • CHILDREN
The Foster Care Community
Every member of the foster care community matters.
2. FOSTER PARENTS
Life changes very quickly for foster parents with new children to care for, trauma to understand, and a system to navigate. Too often, they feel alone or isolated, even sometimes from their church who might be unaware or unprepared to step in and help. Foster parents feel the heartache that comes from holding loosely but loving deeply, as they attach to the children in their care while at the same time pray for restoration, redemption, and reunification of the family.
3. VULNERABLE ADULTS
Biological Parents
Many biological parents grew up in and out of foster care and are caught in the hopeless cycle of substance abuse, addiction, and mental illness. They have few positive role models or safe people to call in times of crisis. Therefore, they are unequipped to care for their children, even though they love them. In times of stress, they often default to what they have experienced in the past and sadly, this can result in abuse or neglect of their children.
Young Adults
Reunification or adoption does not happen for all children who enter foster care. Instead, some leave the system as young adults with no safety net to fall back on. We all crave relationship—we were made for it—and without a family to lean on for support, these young adults face life and all its circumstances on their own. Sadly, for many, their future includes homelessness, addiction, incarceration, or even becoming victims of sex trafficking as they fall prey to those offering relationship.
4. CHILDREN
Children enter foster care because they have been abused or neglected by the very ones meant to keep them safe. This trauma impacts their bodies and their brains in significant ways, which affects their development, attachment, physical health, emotional responses, and behaviors. Once in foster care, a plan is created to bring safety and permanency to the child, whether through reunification with their parents or through adoption or legal guardianship.
400,000
100,000
20,000
Feed the hungry,
and help those in trouble.
Then your light will shine out from the darkness,
and the darkness around you will be as bright as noon.
The Lord will guide you continually,
giving you water when you are dry
and restoring your strength.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like an ever-flowing spring.
Some of you will rebuild the deserted ruins of your cities.
Then you will be known as a rebuilder of walls
and a restorer of homes.
Isaiah 58:10-12