Foster care is fundamentally a temporary solution to a crisis situation. The goal of all foster care placement is the child’s eventual safe return home. Until that happens, child welfare agencies like Saint Francis Ministries work with the parents to help them address the issues that led to their child’s removal and placement into foster care.
“Fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man. The end product of child raising is not the child, but the parent.” Frank Pittman
Each month, we bring a focus on a different topic as a nation, and June brings National Safety Awareness Month. The National Safety Council (NSC) has identified focus areas for each week of National Safety Month.
The traditional kick-off to summer, Memorial Day weekend brings to mind outdoor family fun – grilling, swimming, camping, boating – you get the picture. And since Saint Francis is all about families, we love the holiday.
Wherever you live, odds are kids are getting out of school for the summer this week or within the next couple. That means, there will soon be lots more activity on the sidewalks, streets, and common areas of our communities.
Mental Health Awareness Month takes place every May, and it’s one of those monthly observances that means a lot to Saint Francis Ministries. Just a couple weeks ago, our clinical services director, Pam Cornwell, discussed the relationship between trauma and mental health and how it affects those in our care.
One of Saint Francis Ministries largest programs is foster care. Last year, we served about 4,200 children and teens in foster and kinship care in four of the six states where we have a presence – Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Nebraska. On top of that, we worked with 905 foster/kinship homes to help ensure those young people were properly cared for until they could either reunite with their families or achieve some other type of permanency.
Monday marks the beginning of both Trauma and Mental Health Awareness Month, so this week we explore how trauma and mental illness correlate with each other. Traumatic events are those situations that put you or someone close to you at risk of serious harm or death.
Among the many programs and services Saint Francis Ministries provides, three of our most prominent are foster and kinship care and adoption. This means we must continuously work hard to recruit professional and caring foster care providers.
In 1974 the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) was enacted as a federal measure to address the overwhelming number of children entering the foster care system because of child maltreatment. Yet we continue to have 3.6 million reports of child abuse and neglect annually across the United States.
