Local News
Social Services Introduces Care Communities Concept for Foster Families
The Fond du Lac County Department of Social Services is looking to create Care Communities to help develop a bigger network and support system for local foster families.
Initial Assessment Supervisor Kay Reinhard tells us “right now we have 219 children in out of home care total in Fond du Lac County. And 69 of those children are placed in foster homes and 44 of them are in relative foster homes. We have 77 foster homes and currently only eight openings for any new children coming into foster care. And so if you do the math, that doesn’t leave us with a lot of leeway.”
Reinhard also tells us families cannot always be kept together, but “the more homes that we have, the more likelihood that we can keep
siblings together. And at
Lac
Social Services we are very vested in children staying together, especially
when they’re in out of home care. If you can’t be with mom and dad, you should
be together as a sibling group.”
Wednesday afternoon, Social Services is also hosting the creators of Live the Promise – a ministry that has built Care Communities into a successful model of supporting foster families. The ministry started with ten churches in the Atlanta area, but Initial Assessment Supervisor Erica Winterfeldt says now – “they have close to 120 churches with Care Communities and they found
that two years later – 90-percent of the foster parents continued to provide
foster care. Which is a very high rate.”
Presentations will be held at 3:00pm at the Department of Social Services and at 6:00pm at the Fond du Lac Public Library.