So proud of Creating a Family Board Member, Irene Clements, for her recent opinion piece published by The Chronicle of Social Change. The article ran on May 18, 2018 during National Foster Care Month and highlighted the need to recruit and retain foster parents for the many children in the U.S. foster system who need reliable, safe, and prepared foster parents.

“Unfortunately, we lose too many of our quality foster families. Nearly half of foster parents quit in their first year of fostering due to lack of support, poor communication with caseworkers, insufficient training to address child’s needs and lack of say in the child’s well-being.”

To that end, Clements, Executive Director of the National Foster Parent Association (NFPA), spoke of the recent partnership between NFPA and CHAMPS, a national campaign working to improve foster parenting policies throughout the United States.

Fostering children changes lives one child at a time. It can also bring positive change to birth families. There’s a continuous need for families to step up and become foster families, but there’s an equally urgent need for policy makers and agency leaders to improve policies and practices so that all foster parents have the support they need to provide the stable, loving care children deserve.

The goal of the partnership is to “spur policy reforms in 20 to 25 states over five years to ensure that foster parents are equipped with the training and support they need to be the best they can.”

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Want to know more about how to foster or how to get the word out about the need for foster parents?

Check out this short video and share it! http://bit.ly/becomingafosterparent

National Foster Parent Association website is here: http://nfpaonline.org/

CHAMPS website can be found here: http://fosteringchamps.org/

The National Foster Care Month website is here: https://www.childwelfare.gov/fostercaremonth/