THe Mission

Our mission / Their need

We exist here to instill hope and dignity in children who only know the abuse, neglect, depression, and hopelessness of the system & situation they reside, by giving the unconditional love, help, and Feeling of safety they need.

Our personal story is a story ultimately of success, but it was a heart tugging ride. Through the years of our fostering, we have had so many successes that we can no longer count, and we are not done yet. It has been the most fulfilling thing we have ever done and we adopted 2 of the children we were fostering just over a year ago now and it is, has been, and will be an amazing journey. To watch these children go from hopeless to fully comfortable, happy, adjusted, and flourishing, is amazing without the words.

Even if you can not foster yourself, it really doesn't take much to help bring comfort, safety, and some normalcy to these children in their time of need. Just a few dollars will help out immensely to give these kids some nice clothes, some good food, or even some comfort items, something as simple as a teddy bear they can hold to make them feel comforted. Most of these kids leave everything they have ever known with just a little bit in a trash bag, and coming from someone who has had many foster kids, once they get a shower, a meal, and a nice warm bed, when you open the trash bag, you wouldn't believe how horrible of condition, dirty, and unsanitary the items are in.

We strive to build awareness to the foster system and at risk youth not only here in Indiana, but also nationwide. The foster system is so overtaxed with precious few case workers that are overloaded with cases, many kids fall through the cracks.

By fall through the cracks, this is what we mean. For as overwhelming as the number of children in foster care is, since the Child Services case workers are so few and overtaxed with cases, many children are left in place with the abuse and trauma. Left only with a possible future check up. Being a foster parent myself, we see this first hand. All too often, these "random" check ups are alerted 3 weeks to a month ahead, so there is plenty of time to clean up and hide the abuse and neglect. Its a cat and mouse game with the system hoping not to take on another child that it doesn't have the case workers to handle.

The problem is that the children lose every time, and they are have trauma and even PTSD from it for the rest of their lives, never to forget or lose it, only hoping to stop it from getting worse and coming to terms with it, understanding it is not their fault. The overwhelming majority of these children believe it is their fault, and if they would have been better, they wouldn't have deserved the treatment they received. Most of us cant begin to understand this, as this was not our reality. But, for these children, it is their reality, and many times it carries into adulthood.