Foster care in your community can feel like a puzzle. Like assembling any puzzle, you’ll run into some questions along the way.
Where’s the box top — do we know what this will look like when it’s complete?
Do we have all the pieces, or are we missing some?
How do we put the pieces together?
That second question (do we have all the pieces?) is particularly tricky, because you typically have no way of knowing the answer until you put hours into the puzzle and are left with gaps taunting you.
When you consider the foster care system in your community, you recognize that it’s made up of a complex series of programs, organizations and services delivered by numerous professionals and volunteers. But do you have all the pieces you need to get to more than enough for children and families before, during and beyond foster care?
The seemingly obvious answer to that question is “probably not.” But if I were to ask you which pieces were missing, you’d likely have a harder time giving a precise answer. After all, how many pieces are we supposed to have? Nobody knows.
What if there were a way to inventory both the pieces you have and the pieces you still need? And what if you could tailor your actions as a community to address those missing pieces strategically?
Community mapping in US foster care
More Than Enough, CAFO’s US foster care initiative, has developed a simple community-mapping approach geared toward targeted, collaborative action in the US foster care space. The process isn’t designed to produce a list of every service or ministry in a community mapping directory. Rather, it’s designed to help collaborators focus on essential pieces of the foster care puzzle and then guide them toward identifying a shared project to address a strategic gap together — filling a missing piece of the puzzle.
The pieces of the foster care puzzle
The list of possible services or priorities connected to foster care can feel overwhelming. Recognizing this, our team set out to discover what foster care leaders across the country see as the primary strategic areas of foster care programming in a community. Could we learn what they are and then organize them in a way that is simple and helpful to collaborators in a community?
In 2022, Saddleback Church convened about 35 local and national foster care leaders. One of our objectives during that time was to identify which pieces a community needs in order to reach the goal of more than enough. Exploring this is vital to helping communities ask, “Do we have all the pieces to our foster care puzzle?” We can’t answer that unless we know how many pieces there should be to start.
This discussion generated dozens of ideas about critical components for any local foster care effort. In the months after, we held several follow-up conversations. Eventually, input from these leaders and others, collectively representing hundreds of years of foster care experience, led to what we now call the nine pieces of the foster care puzzle.
The nine pieces your community needs to care for kids and families in foster care
Watch Jason Weber, National Director of More Than Enough, explain the foster care puzzle.
A deeper look at the nine puzzle pieces of US foster care
Wrap-around Support: Mobilize churches to equip wrap-around support teams for foster, kinship, adoptive and biological families. Examples include: respite care, childcare, visitation support, continuing education, tangible needs
Youth Support: Ensure that youth in foster care are well supported during their time in care and as they transition into adulthood. Examples include: mentorship, camps and youth sports leagues, coaching (career, college and financial), life skills training
Biological Family Services: Provide families with the help they need to stay together or reunify. Examples include: mentorship, child development training, addiction intervention and recovery, tangible needs
Child Welfare System Support: Build supportive relationships with case workers, administrators, lawyers and judges to reduce turnover and improve outcomes. Examples include: church-based social worker partnership programs, appreciation events, family court partnerships, legal advocacy
Kinship Family Finding and Growth: Identify, prepare and develop kinship connections for temporary care and permanent placement. Examples include: online kinship connection search tools, trauma training, support groups
Foster Family Finding and Growth: Identify, prepare and develop foster families for children and teens with various care needs. Examples include: exploratory classes for those considering foster care, recruitment events, foster parent training, support groups
Professional Services: Ensure that high-quality professional services are accessible and affordable for children and families. Examples include: medical care that accepts Medicaid, physical and occupational therapy, legal services, trauma-informed counseling
Adoptive Family Finding and Growth: Identify, prepare and develop families for children and teens waiting to be adopted. Examples include: child-specific recruitment, trauma training, exploratory classes for those considering adoption
Care Sharing: Connect those who have tangible needs with those who have tangible resources to offer. Examples include: online care-sharing platform, foster closets, engaging local businesses to meet tangible needs
Discovering your community
Following the nine-puzzle-piece framework helps collaborators better inventory their communities’ strengths and gaps. Like community mapping, this process involves being curious, investigating what God is doing in a community and building relationships. But the end goal isn’t to have a directory, or even to do something new together and add a service to a list.
The goal is to identify the most strategic next thing to do together to help provide more than enough for children and families before, during and beyond foster care.
CAFO’s More Than Enough support team has walked with several communities through this one-month process called Discovering Your Community. In this process, collaborators do three things:
- Take inventory of everything they already know about the strengths and gaps in each of the nine puzzle pieces.
- Identify at least nine people in the community representing these puzzle pieces and have conversations with them to learn what they don’t already know about the strengths and gaps in foster care in their community.
- Start with all the strengths and gaps they have identified and go through a guided process to determine the top three gaps the collaboration can address to make the biggest possible difference for children and families. They are ultimately making this decision based on input from the leaders they’ve listened to, the things they’ve learned, and the ideas they have identified that will create the most leverage in the foster care ecosystem in their community.
More Than Enough has also created the Foster Care Strategy Hub to connect collaborators with a number of excellent national programs and models that can help fill the highest-leverage gaps they identify.
Laying the groundwork for collaboration
Community mapping — and the Discovering Your Community process — is powerful because it draws so many threads of collaboration together.
It requires being curious and listening to others well, which builds trust and relationships. It helps identify and celebrate what God is already doing in a community, which encourages collaborators who are often weary of seeing so many areas of lack. And it helps communities identify the most strategic next step, filling a gap that will make the biggest difference for children and families before, during and beyond foster care.
Discovering Your Community
Learn more about Discovering Your Community, a collaborative project from CAFO’s More Than Enough initiative. This five-week collaborative learning experience will guide you and a group of your local collaborators through a three-stage process of understanding the nine essential pieces for serving children and families in foster care, identifying the biggest strengths and gaps in foster care in your county and determining the best next steps forward.
