As a kid, I loved going to the grocery store with my mom. My favorite part was the cereal aisle. We would arrive at the store, and while my mom was perusing the produce, I would mosey over to the cereal aisle because I knew it would take some time to make this critical decision.
It can be overwhelming when you’re a kid looking at an enormous wall of cereal. There are a lot of criteria you could use to make that decision, depending on your priorities.
You could choose the cereal at the lowest cost, but let’s be honest — when you’re 10 years old, you don’t care about the cost. You could choose based on what’s healthiest. Again, let’s not kid ourselves here. You could decide based on what tastes the best, and every kid knows that what tastes the best directly correlates to how much sugar is in it. Finally, you could choose based on which cereal has the best prize that week.
And so, depending on the week, the prizes, and how I felt that day, I would agonize for way too long about this decision. However, the number of boxes of Fruity Pebbles I devoured as a kid indicates that sugar was pretty high on my priority list. (Don’t judge me — it was the ‘80s. We were still putting lead in the gasoline and playing lawn darts, so sugary cereals were the least of our worries.)
The path toward transforming foster care where we live requires working together, rather than in isolation. But as we begin collaborating with others in our community, we quickly face an important question: What should we work on together first?
Our Past Priorities
When collaborators in a community are looking to do something bigger together for the first time, they use various criteria to decide what to tackle first. Here are a few of the priorities that often govern the way local foster care strategies get chosen. However, keep in mind, these particular priorities may not lead us to the things that will make the biggest difference for children and families:
Engagement
Sometimes we choose the thing that we think will get the most people involved, even if what we’re doing doesn’t actually make much of a difference for hurting families.
For example, backpack drives for kids in foster care can be great in the right circumstances and are an easy way to engage many people. However, some local child welfare offices are up to their eyeballs in backpacks because nobody bothered to ask if they were needed. In addition, the folks who pack the backpacks often don’t get engaged with longer-term, more strategic ways of caring for kids and families.
It Worked There ….
We hear or read about another community doing a certain thing and think, Hey, we should do that! And we might be right. The best ideas often come from others. But just because a strategy works for one community doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for another. A good idea implemented in the wrong place is just a bad idea.
Funding
Just because an organization, church or individual is willing to fund an idea doesn’t make it a good one. In fact, some ideas can hurt more than help.
Over the years, I’ve been approached by people connected to a well-meaning, generous donor with land they’d like turned into an “orphanage.” These conversations provide valuable opportunities to educate others on what we’ve learned about the best ways to care for kids. However, we should never say yes to a strategy just because someone is willing to pay for it. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
If we decide what we will do together in foster care based on these priorities and others like them, we might not do the things that could make the biggest difference for children and families. In other words, if we make decisions based on the wrong priorities, we might end up with more sugar than substance.
A Better Way
So, what should our priorities be when considering what action to take together? Three great strategies to start with are listening, learning and leveraging.
Listening
A foster care leader who has helped build church-based foster care movements once told me that when you enter a new context — a state, a county or a church — you start making assumptions. Your brain insists that you must act based on prior experience. But wisdom says otherwise. Your first move should be simple: just listen. As James 1:19 says, “Be quick to listen, slow to speak…”.
Listen to the needs and what insiders are saying about the issues they face. You may not always agree, but once you’ve listened, you’re in a much better place to help. Just as important, listening conveys respect, which is critical as you build trust with community partners.
The tendency to jump to conclusions can be seen in overseas missions. We assume that poverty can be solved with money, homelessness with housing, and a lack of education with schools. But these issues are complex. I’ll never forget a conversation with a missionary about abandoned tractors we saw littering the landscape in the country he served. A donor, wanting to “teach a man to fish,” provided a tractor to encourage agriculture. But replacement parts were expensive and hard to find. Within months, the gift became a costly piece of yard art.
If we’re not careful, our foster care solutions can end up the same way. Real solutions may be less obvious and come from unexpected places.
Any foster care strategy should start with listening. There are practical ways to ensure this. First, seek out different perspectives on foster care in your community. Resist the urge to launch into your own vision. Instead, ask good questions and listen. Second, go in pairs with another advocate interested in foster care collaboration. One of you can engage in conversation while the other takes notes. Finally, be curious. If someone comments, “Interest in foster parenting has really dropped,” don’t just write that down. Ask, “Why do you think that is?”
Learning
Part of learning about foster care in your community comes from listening to others, but this information also comes from paying attention and making observations. Consider yourself a detective, and your goal is to put together clues you find — social media posts, news articles, announcements at church about a new recovery program, or word of mouth — to figure out what is happening and what resources are missing in your community for children and families in foster care.
Several communities we’ve worked with have discovered that there were a lot more resources available for children and families than they could ever have imagined. However, they also discovered that many foster families and social workers were unaware that these resources existed. Understanding this dynamic is the first step toward addressing it.
Leverage
Knowing that we cannot engage everywhere at once, we need to figure out where we can strategically work that will create positive changes in other parts of the foster care ecosystem in our community. We will invest our time, talent and treasure in something. So we should ask what we can invest in that will make the biggest impact on children and families.
Our goal is not to simply do something or to simply get people involved. We want to see children in well-supported families, whether those families are foster, kinship, adoptive or biological. Because these are our ultimate aims, we want to ensure that the things we choose to do are highly leveraged and can get us closer to more than enough for children and families before, during and beyond foster care in our communities.
For example, while we could direct all our efforts toward more foster parent recruitment, a leverage mindset understands that supporting existing foster families well can improve retention rates from somewhere around 50% up to nearly 90%. The more foster families we keep by supporting them well, the fewer foster families we have to recruit.
Lessons Learned in the Cereal Aisle
Whether or not you realize it, you are going to use some kind of criteria to choose your next box of cereal at the grocery store. You are also going to use some kind of criteria to choose your next move in foster care in your community.
As you begin to think about what you and others could do to make a difference for children and families in your community, reject some of the traditional criteria used in the past and decide how you will move forward. Lean toward the criteria most likely to get you where you want to go. Listen, learn and look for the opportunities that will afford the highest leverage.
Using the right criteria will make the difference between spinning your wheels and moving decisively toward more than enough.
-Jason Weber is the National Director of More Than Enough, facilitated by the CAFO community.
Want to learn more about how you can work with others to transform foster care where you live?
This post is adapted from the newly released second edition of Until There’s More Than Enough, by Jason Weber. Check it out and start moving from not enough to more than enough in your community.
