Imagine you are seven years old and you have just been awakened in the middle of the night, maybe by police officers or apologetic social workers, and ripped from your parents’ arms.
If you’re lucky, you’re handed a trash bag to toss your entire life into. If not, then you may find yourself arriving empty-handed to a state office where a frazzled, full-time employee will try to wash the lice out of your hair in the bathroom sink, then stick you under a waiting room chair to sleep for the two days you’ll most likely be there.
You are just another child being shuttled into foster care. Just another statistic set to repeat every two minutes.
Like a staggering 61 percent of children, you probably come from a home of neglect, or, like 17 percent, abuse. You’re hungry, hurt, and frightened, and your only company is a weary-eyed worker who shares her sandwich and tries to smile at one of the 678 (if you’re in Texas) foster kids who float by in limbo every month.
Right now, your brain is most likely beginning to process the post-traumatic stress you will later be diagnosed with. You are unaware that you will likely spend the next few months with total strangers.
As of this moment, 8,000 children are drifting through the Tennessee foster care system. Three-hundred and fifty of those children are awaiting adoption. Our governor, Bill Lee, has been rapidly attempting to push forward legislative action and awareness for the condition and wellbeing of these children. Lee launched a campaign just last month titled TN Fosters Hope.
It is, to quote his website; “a statewide collaborative campaign engaging state agencies, community organizations, the business community and churches to elevate high quality care and opportunities for children and families impacted by foster care and adoption.”
This call to action I am sponsoring is to compliment the financial resources that this initiative has provided. Both my proposition and Governor Lee’s agenda prioritize utilizing church communities as a stabilizer in the foster care system.
Consider this. If Tennessee had 400 churches available to step up and support foster families, that would be two children per church. However, that is not the case. The reality is that in Knoxville alone there are 408 churches. In all of Tennessee there are 11,007 churches. If it truly does take a village to raise a child, and if the Tennessee Christian community would step up, we could offer complete foster stability for every foster child in Tennessee with 3,007 entire church communities left over. This is more than enough to sponsor a church-to-child ratio equal to the total international US adoptions for the entire 2019 year.
Christian and church communities are big on charity. We invest, we donate, we fundraise. But a Church community’s biggest resource is its ability to reach out on a personal level.
Many churches have “missionary families” that they sponsor overseas. Having an active member of the Church community financially support, engage in, and interact with the foster system on a personal level by partnering with a local child under the care of a local family that they supply with meals, watch over, and support through schooling, is much more effective.
Giving anonymously to nonprofits that will disperse resources, even generously but on a broad and lackluster level, can apply brief relief to those in need. Relational investment is a bigger and more beautiful sacrifice.
The foster system has long struggled with how to raise awareness, support, and encouragement for those who choose to foster by attempting to find genuine families and by not over-incentivizing fostering.
Churches have a predisposition to the requirements of fostering. They have the ability to invest personally, to raise community awareness, and they possess a pre-existing motivation and accountability setup to ensure genuine families are formed.
If, in partnering with the TN Fosters Hope campaign, the 11,007 Tennessee churches would shoulder the burden of caring for the orphans, the neglected, and the abused, then we could form a cornerstone to stabilize the resources and wellbeing of every foster child in Tennessee—and beyond.
Seventeen-year-old Abby Thomas is a rising senior, homeschooled with Classical Conversations under Cumberland Christian Academy. Thomas wrote an advocacy paper on this particular subject because she believes that as Christians, we must secure the wellbeing of children after birth; not just in advocating for life, but for quality of life.
For more information about fostering in the state of Tennessee, visit Gov. Lee’s Website at: https://tnfostershope.tn.gov/
Information on how you can help locally can also be found at https://isaiah117house.com/