Summit VI – Church Alternatives to Foster Care

Posted by Patrick Corkum on April 30, 2010

I love when someone re-looks at a problem and goes to the source of the problem. Foster Care is a reactive solution to a problem. Foster Care is a state-run system where they take seriously at-risk and/or abused children and take them from their family and put them into another family. There are SO many problems with this. The gentleman speaking just told everyone about a story where someone had said that children are safer in their current bad situation than if they were put into Foster Care. I don’t want to go into the reasons to that here, I will do that some other time.

What are they doing in Illinois that has helped reduce the Foster Care system from almost 60,000 kids to 16,000 kids? Safe Families. Here’s the idea, get Christian families, put them through training and allow parents to voluntarily put their children into a Safe Family. Then they help those parents recover and turn around so that they can get their kids back. Orphan/Foster child prevention rocks!

More people should try to find better ways of doing things instead of just going down the status-quo. We need people to be pro-active, not re-active. How do we keep kids out of the system?