Imagine if you will…..
You’ve been taken away from your parents home and sent to live in a house with strangers. These strangers take you to a different school where you have no friends, and take you to meetings, to court, to visits with your social worker who tries to tell you what you can and cannot do. You can’t even stay at a friend’s house without consent from four different people. Your freedom is gone, the life you used to know is completely different. You spend the holidays with these people, who can’t afford to buy you proper gifts. After you get used to this new home with new strangers, they take you away and put you in yet another house with yet another new stranger. Imagine that all of this happens before you turn 10 years old.
How would you react or feel? Would you be appreciative, or would you be angry? Would you feel lonely or loved? Would you feel whole or broken? If someone offered to love you would you accept it or push it away out of fear that they won’t stay forever?
This is what life is like for children in the Foster System. They have been through neglect, abuse, abandonment, and have changed homes so many times they’ve lost count. So they react by acting out with violence, verbal assault, anger, running away, depression, suicide. This is the reality, and this is what we are trying to change.
I work for a program through the non-profit organization San Diego Center for Children called the Foster Family Agency Stabilization and Treatment (FFAST) program. Our goal is to ensure stability for children ages 0-21 in the Foster System with mental health and behavioral issues, to improve their health and well-being and work towards a permanent placement. Our therapist work in the homes and try their best to show these children that they matter and they are seen.
I love working for this program, to see the care these therapists put into their work, and to watch their interactions with the children helping them towards success. Our program has seen wonderful outcomes due to the professionalism and care of the therapists.
(To read a story of success from one of these therapists, please scroll to the bottom of this blog.)
As you can see our program is dedicated to the success of the children we work with. Our goal is to finding that forever home for these children.
But we also need your help!
This Holiday Season we will be hosting a Holiday Party for the Foster Families in our program. At this event we will be doing many different things to show our support for them and to give them an unforgettable Holiday Season. Here are some things we will be doing:
- Santa’s Workshop: Where foster parents can stuff a bag full of gifts for their children and give them things that normally they would not be able to afford on their government allowance. This gives them an opportunity to show the children that they matter.
- Family Portraits: So many children in the Foster System have never had a family picture taken. They have never had a true family. So we want to give them something special, a memory that will last forever and show them that having a family is a possibility.
- Relaxation Room: We hope to have an extra room where children with sensory issues can go to relax and calm down when they become overwhelmed, but still enjoy the party.
- Foster Parent Massages: Being a foster parent is one of the hardest jobs, especially being a foster parent for a child with disabilities. So we want to provide a little piece of paradise for them to relax. We will be hiring massage therapists to give short 10-20 minute chair massages to foster parents during the party.
In order to make all of this happen we need to raise $4,000 or more. So far we have raised $2,000! But we still need your help to make this possible! So if this Holiday season you would like to give, even if its only $10, we would appreciate anything! Please send checks made out to San Diego Center for Children and please note somewhere on the check “For FFAST holiday party only”. You can mail these checks in to:
San Diego Center for Children: FFAST
3002 Armstrong St.
San Diego, CA 92111
Please help make this Holiday season special for a Foster Child! Thank you and God bless!
