Like a puzzle where you don’t have all the pieces, trying to provide more than enough for children and families before, during and beyond foster care without all the programs and services you need is impossible.
But what are those pieces, and how do you know if you have them?
Discovering Your Community, a community mapping process designed by More Than Enough, CAFO’s US foster care initiative, helps communities answer that question.
In this process, a group of collaborators in a single county inventories the nine pieces of the foster care puzzle to determine which they have and which they still need. Then they tailor their actions as a community to address those missing pieces together.
But what does that look like on the ground? The More Than Enough support team has had the privilege of walking alongside counties as part of the More Than Enough Fellowship, a funded launch cohort that guides groups of collaborators in US communities through the earliest stages of working together to provide more than enough for children and families in foster care.
As part of the Fellowship, these local collaborators complete the Discovering Your Community process. It continues to yield both relational and strategic wins, helping communities fill the gaps that will make the biggest difference in caring for children and families in foster care.
Here are a few of their stories about what the process looks like.
A community mapping surprise put the focus on kinship families in Allen County, Indiana
Rachel Bristol, part of a collaboration in Allen County, Indiana, saw listening to her community as the essential starting point. “Our group really focused on those community conversations [where we met with people representing the nine puzzle pieces] to get a good picture of what was going on in our county … we actually interviewed 20 people. Those conversations were invaluable because they gave us the opportunity to get to know all the work these different people and organizations are doing. But it also gave them an opportunity to know our hearts and where we think that the Lord is leading us.”
From that foundation of relationship-building and listening, they learned some unexpected things.
“At the beginning of our process, we thought that foster parent recruitment was going to be a big gap,” explained Bristol. “But when we were actually interviewing people and digging a little bit deeper, we learned that here in our county, they actually do a really good job of recruiting foster families.”
They were pleasantly surprised that their assumptions were off; recruitment is a struggle in many counties, and it was great news that Allen County had that piece of the puzzle in place. So what was the most strategic gap they could fill in their community?
Bristol shared, “What we actually found was that a large portion of children in our county are placed in kinship homes.”
It was more good news: Children in Allen County were often being placed with family members or friends who could provide a safe home, so children were experiencing less disruption than being placed with strangers. But in Bristol’s words, “those homes need a lot of additional support and working with those families requires some creativity.”
This was their strategic gap: support for foster families, with special attention to kinship families. So the group of churches, organizations and advocates — now known as the Foster Collaborative — focused on connecting foster and kinship families to community services and churches. The Foster Collaborative has also designed an upcoming kids camp to both bless foster and kinship families and create an opportunity to build relationships with more families.
If the collaboration hadn’t started with gaining an understanding of their community and looking for the most strategic gap, they likely would have defaulted to a foster family recruitment project. But instead, as Bristol explained, “those nine pieces … let us see some of these areas we’re already doing really well in this county. And then there’s some that we never would have even thought about being connected.”
New connections led to cars for vulnerable families in Shelby County, Tenn.
A few years ago, several churches and organizations in Shelby County, Tennessee, started collaborating together as Memphis Interfaith Foster and Adoptive Ministries (MIFAM). Shortly after launching, several collaborators joined the More Than Enough Fellowship and started the Discovering Your Community process.
Through their conversations with people across their county and their inventory of the nine puzzle pieces, they realized that support for biological and kinship families was a major gap.
Richard Roseland, one of the collaborators, explained: “We noticed that there were some ministries and churches that care for them whenever they’re in the beginning of the process, but [less was available] on the follow-through.”
They also heard a familiar refrain in the stories of biological and kinship families: transportation was a challenge.
With limited mass transit in Memphis, many biological families, especially single moms, were reliant on rides from people who were unsafe for them or their children. Or biological and kinship families would get just enough cash to buy an inexpensive car that would break down almost immediately, leaving them in the same predicament all over again.
But the collaboration had an idea. While doing their community interviews, they had breakfast with a leader at a ministry that none of them had previously known about: Midsouth Hope Garage, a mechanic shop and nonprofit that receives donated cars, repairs them, and gives them to vulnerable people — especially single moms — in their community.
The connection was a godsend for both the MIFAM collaboration and Midsouth Hope Garage.
“Midsouth was a new ministry. They felt very alone, and that there was no one there alongside them … after that initial conversation with them, we were able to invite them to our MIFAM meeting, which opened the doors for them to be involved with a lot of different ministries.”
Then, the newly expanded collaboration hosted an antique car show called Restoring Hope, bringing people from across the community together to connect with MIFAM and Midsouth Hope Garage. They also presented two vulnerable families with repaired cars at the event.
Moving toward one another has been a gift to all the ministries involved. “Through the collaboration, Midsouth has been able to make connections with ministries that are actually in need of receiving donated vehicles.” These ministries can now better serve kinship and biological families and meet their transportation needs.
And being part of the collaboration has helped Midsouth connect with churches and advocates who can help scale their work. “Once a month, they do mechanic days, where [mechanics] come and fix vehicles, [and volunteers] do interior detailing and car washing,” Roseland shared. “We’ve seen an uptick in additional churches and individuals who are getting excited about Midsouth Hope Garage and the ministry that they’re doing.”
Discovering and connecting the dots between existing ministries as part of a unified, foster care ecosystem has multiplied the impact of all of them — and helped fill a crucial gap for kids and families.
Giving people a person, not a directory, in Weld County, Colorado
In Weld County, Colorado, Liz Brodzinski and other foster care leaders leaned into the community conversations and listening process.
“We spent a lot of time talking to people who were already inside our network, but also a lot of people who were outside of our network,” shared Brodzinski.
The collaborators expected they’d find major gaps, that their community just wouldn’t have some of the pieces of the foster care puzzle. But the process surprised them.
“We found that we had lots of strengths as a community … and found even more resources that we didn’t even realize were out there. But what we really discovered is that while we had a plethora of resources, we still had families that were saying, ‘We don’t have enough resources …’.”
So they dug deeper, listening to families. “We found that what families really meant was they didn’t know how to access these resources, and especially when families are in crisis, they didn’t have the time or the opportunity to be able to go and research and figure out what’s the best resource for them.”
This realization was a game-changer for the collaboration: They had the pieces in their community, but families couldn’t effectively access them and receive the support that would be most helpful for them.
The Weld County collaboration could have just created a directory or list of services to contact and handed it to parents. But they knew that wouldn’t actually move the needle for kids and families.
“Nobody wants another list of resources. It gets outdated. It’s super hard to keep up, and inevitably, it just gets lost in somebody’s desk drawer and never gets pulled out again,” explained Brodzinski.
So instead, they tried out a service built around relationships to help families navigate those resources.
“We really took a liaison-style approach … it was very relational. We brought coffee; we had a conversation. We listened to their story, we listened [to their needs], and then we helped connect them to the resources … but we didn’t just give them a list. We made an introduction to someone at that organization or in that resource, or we helped them make the first phone call … we stayed with them until they felt comfortable.”
The Weld County collaboration has now launched a formal program to offer this liaison service to families in the county, giving families a person to guide them through the services available in their community and ensure they get what they need.
This program was born out of listening well, seeing if they had the pieces of the puzzle, and realizing that the gap in Weld County was actually the connection and accessibility of the pieces themselves.
Looking at your community through the lens of hope, not scarcity
We so often see the “not enoughs” of foster care in our communities. It can feel overwhelming — or even discouraging — to think about inventorying what pieces of the puzzle you have and don’t have.
But when we stop to listen well and open our eyes to see what God is already doing, our perspective is realigned. We identify the areas of abundance, not just the areas of lack.
As Roseland of the Shelby County collaboration put it, “In the discovery process, you’re able to find there aren’t as big of gaps as you thought there were. You’re able to discover ministries and churches that are actually doing the work but feeling alone in the work, and those partnerships and collaborations are so incredibly beautiful.”
For the Weld County collaboration, the Discovering Your Community process also had a unifying effect.
Brodzinski shared, “I realized so many people in our community were also wanting the same thing, but what we lacked was some of that structure … we have some people that are really passionate about this, but we don’t know how to bring others in. The process helped us go from a dream to a reality in a project … we could actually get around and do together.”
As people across churches, organizations and agencies start pulling in the same direction, the stubborn “not enoughs” of foster care are slowly transformed into places of God’s provision. And that provision often flows through people showing up with what they have and focusing their efforts on something new they could do — together.
Do you want to kickstart collaboration to transform foster care where you live?
Check out the More Than Enough Fellowship, the funded launch cohort in which all three of the county collaborations above participated. It will guide you and other collaborators in your US community through the earliest stages of working together to provide more than enough for children and families in foster care. It includes the Discovering Your Community process, alongside matching funding and other coaching and guidance for emerging foster care collaborations.
