Christian Alliance for Orphans Home

The Institute for Family-Centered Healing & Health

Foster and adoptive families can experience healing and growth over time.

We’re committed to helping you — or the families you serve — get there.

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Seeing and Caring for Families

For nearly two decades, CAFO has been committed to strengthening and encouraging the people of God as they welcome vulnerable children into their lives.

From social workers to medical professionals to church leaders to friends, countless people have a role to play in offering that welcome.

But God has given parents a central calling — and a uniquely powerful role — in helping children experience healing and growth over time.

The Institute for Family-Centered Healing & Health is here to support foster and adoptive parents in this beautiful and challenging role. The Institute equips parents with trusted parenting tools that acknowledge the challenges of trauma or adversity, but also emphasize the power of daily habits and Christian practices to help families experience healing and connectedness over time.

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Our Focus Areas

We’re here to help organizations, agencies and churches better care for families, helping them prevent family burnout and support long-term family growth.

Curating Resources

We highlight trustworthy resources grounded in Scripture and science, tailoring them for Christian foster and adoptive parents.

Filling the Gaps

We create new, practical trainings and other tools for ministries to share with the families they support.

Sparking Improvement

We seek to nurture fresh insight and practices across the field as a dynamic hub for experts and practitioners.

CONNECT WITH THE FAMILY INSTITUTE

Four commitments shape everything we do:

Seeing the whole person

True health involves the whole person — body, mind, spirit and relationships. We consider all aspects of a person to promote flourishing.

Enveloping children in a vibrant home

The home is an essential place for healing and health. We want to empower parents to play a central role in God’s healing work in their children’s lives over the long haul.

Participating in the Christian life

A life lived unto God is distinctly good, both for children and adults. Inviting children to share in the Christian life lays the groundwork for healing, even as we trust God with the ultimate outcomes.

Growing together, bit by bit

Change rarely comes quickly, but is cultivated over time through small, repeated habits. We emphasize simple practices — for parents and kids — that can help families experience healing and growth together.

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Rachel Medefind

Hi! I'm Rachel Medefind.

Rachel is the Director of the CAFO Institute for Family-Centered Healing & Health.

She has a background in physical therapy and holds a Master’s in Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health from King’s College London, specializing in early adversity. Rachel has served on multiple boards supporting vulnerable children and helped found Tyndale Christian School in Arlington, Virginia. She advises families facing complex parenting challenges and has invested deeply in education and youth formation. Her recent book, When There Is Crisis: A Handbook for Christian Foster & Adoptive Families Facing Serious Struggle, offers biblically grounded principles and research-based, practical guidance to support families walking through seasons of crisis. Rachel and her husband, Jedd, have welcomed children through birth, adoption and foster care.
Contact Rachel

Discover Resources from the Family Institute

Explore a library of tools designed specifically for the realities that foster and adoptive families face. From navigating seasons of parenting crisis to the role of the body in mental health to the latest data about Gen Z’s well-being, the resource library is here to help foster and adoptive families experience less strain, more peace and real growth as healing steadily takes root in their children’s lives.

RESOURCE LIBRARY
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