Fostering Faithfully

We desperately need foster parents for teenagers!

March is National Professional Social Work Month Social workers are unsung heroes in our community. Unless you are in the trenches of foster care, (which so few are) you might not know that social workers have a thankless, disturbing, and overwhelming amount of work to do each day. Just this past week a caseworker was at my home at 9pm one night, and then again at 7pm another night bringing my beloved foster child home. Social workers are a gateway for many families in crisis to receive much needed services to repair their families. They are also the first point of contact for a foster child, guardian ad litem, and foster parents who are all working together to care for an abused or neglected child. Caseworkers are expected to take a work week with 173 hours and cram about 300 hours of work into that week. Caseworkers at DSS often have at least 30 children/families to serve. That may not sound like too many except that due to our shortage of foster homes half or mo...

Fostering Faithfully's subtitle is often "working together to serve foster children in our community." There is nowhere this is more apparent then at the Fostering Faithfully resource center. The center is centrally located in Oconee county at Bountyland Baptist Church/LifePoint Church in Seneca, who so generously lends us their space and also allows the Oconee Foster Parent Association to meet on campus monthly so that our families can also have a monthly time to pick up things they need! Donations from kind community members are dropped off at Upstate Children's Center in Walhalla or Oakway. We take clothing/shoes/equipment for kids ages newborn-12/14, and we keep a few things for teenage placements. Fostering Faithfully also spends funds being sure there are cribs, car seats, lice treatments, care bags with toothbrushes, etc., stocked at the center for DSS or foster parents. We have had many student organizations, community and church groups, and busines...