Posted Wednesday, May 15, 2019 by Team Northwoods

National Foster Care Month: Organizations Doing Amazing Work for Kids

National Foster Care Month recognizes the role that each person can play in enhancing the lives of more than 440,000 children and youth in foster care, plus hundreds of thousands more who have aged out or found permanent homes.

To honor it, we’re shining the spotlight on some of the organizations doing amazing work to support these kids and their families across the country.

  • A Home Within: Creates and supports stable, caring relationships for foster youth in an effort to enhance the emotional well-being of the entire foster care community.If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.
  • America’s Kids Belong: Works with government, business, faith, and creative leaders in various states to recruit and provide wrap-around support for foster and adoptive families, while helping youth who have aged out without a family reach their full potential.
  • BEST Kids: Places caring and consistent adults in the lives of DC's children and youth in foster care with the goals of increasing independent living skills, social skills, self-confidence, and educational achievement.
  • Coalition for Children, Youth & Families: Strengthens and supports foster and adoptive families in Wisconsin, equipping them with the tools and resources they need to continually move toward resilience and stability.
  • Foster Club: Offers several different programs to help young people in and from foster care become connected, educated, inspired, and represented so they can realize their personal potential and contribute to a better life for their peers.
  • Fostering Love: Organizes potluck dinners, respite nights, dinner-delivery services, and other activities to provide care for those on the frontlines of foster care in Central Ohio (Franklin County), including foster children and parents, caseworkers, biological parents, and caregivers. Happiness can be found even in the most difficult of times when one only remembers to turn on the light.
  • Foster Youth Education Fund: Empowers former foster youth in the Sacramento area to achieve their higher education dreams through scholarships and funds for tuition, housing, books, computers, and campus transportation.
  • Hearts to Homes: Assists newly independent young adults who have just aged out of foster care in New York City and Westchester County by providing the essentials to furnish a new home.
  • James Storehouse: Provides emergency resources to foster children and their caregiving families in Ventura County and Los Angeles County in California. (Note: If you live outside of the area but still want to donate, James Storehouse has an Amazon registry with the key items they need to help expedite children joining their new foster families.)
  • More Than Words: Provides paid employment, job training, and long-term career planning for foster and at-risk youth in Greater Boston to prepare them for meaningful careers while helping address personal barriers to success.
  • National Foster Parent Association: Supports foster, kinship, and adoptive families through networking, education, advocacy, and other comprehensive resources to ensure the children in their care are safe, nurtured, and have lasting relationships.I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.
  • Project Meet Me Halfway: Brings awareness to the challenges faced by youth aging out of foster care and how people can get involved to help them help themselves.
  • Ticket to Dream: Helps kids be kids by partnering with local communities and businesses to ensure foster youth of all ages have school supplies, access to computers, or properly fitting close and shoes, while also funding enriching life experiences like a trip to the zoo, tickets to events, or reuniting with a sibling at summer camp.
  • Together We Rise: Uses service-learning activities to educate volunteers on issues surrounding the foster care system, while helping 250 kids in foster care nationwide every single day by providing things like new bicycles, college supplies, and “sweet cases” (duffel bags) so they do not have to travel from home to home with their belongings in a trash bag.
  • Treehouse: Provides over 7,500 foster youth in Washington each year with the academic and essential support they need to succeed in school and launch successfully into adulthood.

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Additional resources:

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