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Hey Fam,
It’s been over 10 years since I first began my foster care journey. Compelled by my faith to love and welcome children into my home and heart, I was eager to make a difference in the lives of vulnerable kids and families. I was surrounded by friends and family who cared about our family, but didn’t understand; surrounded by people who were supportive of our family’s mission but didn’t know how to help. Within a few years of welcoming children into our home and walking with their families, I found myself feeling isolated and overwhelmed, in desperate need of community and support.
I was sure there were others who felt as I did, so I created a space for us to gather together in mutual support and encouragement. I put out the word to other New Jersey foster and adoptive moms and was shocked when forty-five local moms showed up to my church for the first unofficial support group meeting. Foster the Family was born.
Once we were gathered in the community, I saw that these foster, adoptive, and kinship parents experienced many of the same challenges I was experiencing. They knew the overwhelm of a child dropped on a doorstep with nothing but a trash bag of a few items. They knew the confusion of navigating the system and the challenges of walking with biological family. They knew the loneliness of inviting trauma into their homes and the disruption of challenging behaviors.
I spoke to many people who couldn’t welcome children into their homes who still wanted to make a difference in the lives of vulnerable kids and families. I heard from people in the community who were driven by the need of these precious children, friends in local churches who were compelled by the same Biblical passages to love and serve that I was. So I began organizing churches, community organizations, and businesses around the practical needs of the foster parents I was in community with.
We coordinated our efforts to collect everything that a child would need upon being placed in a foster home. My basement became the storage center for clothing, diapers, coloring books, teddies, and everything else that would one day fill the first FosterCare Package for a local foster family. People from local churches and businesses began to “put their money where their mouth is” in a very literal way, until we were able to move into our first home in Cherry Hill, NJ.
Driven by my faith, my love for the kids and families impacted by foster care, and my passion to support the families welcoming them, Foster the Family was formalized into a nonprofit organization and became my life’s mission and work.
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For the past seven years, I’ve had the privilege of watching the impact of Foster the Family continue to grow. We’ve expanded to serve families in 35 states and Canada, offer holistic support in 7 local offices, and have impacted tens of thousands of people. The Filled Gathering, our only faith-based offering, grew from 80 moms in 2019 to an anticipated 1,250 foster, adoptive, and kinship moms in 2025. We’ve expanded our local office programming to include childcare for support groups, respite events, training, and family gatherings. We’ve grown to value the importance of meaningful, collaborative partnership with other organizations serving kids and families.
Our work has always been rooted in our values of compassion, commitment, cultivation, collaboration, and community. Our mission has always remained focused on creating a caring space place for all foster, adoptive, and kinship families, regardless of religious beliefs or any other factor. And our hearts have always been driven by our love for God and the kids and families he so loves.
So now we would like to re-introduce ourselves–as exactly who we’ve always been. We have a fancy new website and a brand new logo (check it out!) that better reflects our mission of wrapping around the whole family. Our staff has multiplied, and our programs have an impact beyond anything I could’ve ever imagined at the inception of Foster the Family seven years ago. But our focus and mission have remained the same—supporting families who are welcoming kids so that children experience belonging and healing.
We love doing this work, and we are so grateful for the opportunities to continue to make a greater impact through more office launches, more support groups, more program offerings, and more partner collaborations. We cannot do this work without you, so thank you for joining us in bringing hope and help to kids and families.
