You are not merely changing the life of a child today,
but you are impacting the trajectory of future generations forever.
Here's how you can get involved with our featured non-profit organization: America’s Kids Belong
www.americaskidsbelong.org
Mission: Our mission is to empower leaders in government, faith-based, business, and creative sectors to end the crisis for kids in foster care – state by state. Currently, there are not enough licensed foster families in most states to meet the need. Also, approaches to foster care reforms, awareness efforts, and recruitment campaigns are often isolated "silo" kinds of approaches that do not have the impact that they could if multiple sectors were engaged together to solve this issue.
I Belong Project
The I Belong Project empowers our adoption eligible kids to tell about themselves and what they want in a family through high quality videos made in partnership with local Department of Children's and Human Services.
Dream Makers Project
Our Dream Makers program engages our older teenagers who are aging out of the foster care system. Our goal is to inspire and empower these teens by giving them an opportunity to dream about their future. These dreams may be an internship that connects them with an opportunity for the future, a practical gift to launch them towards their next step. Currently active in 5 states.
What is the organization aiming to accomplish?
We are using a "Collective Impact" approach where we empower leaders across sectors to innovate and leverage their platforms and skills to make a coordinated impact on improving outcomes with foster care. This could involve increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of a state's recruitment efforts, improving awareness in churches to better wrap around foster and a adoptive families, helping businesses to use their influence to provide incentives and become more foster friendly (similar to providing senior citizen discounts), and empowering creative influencers to use their platforms to help create awareness for the need for foster families and support for those who step up.
We empower and equip leaders in the government, business, faith based and creative sectors to end the crisis for kids in foster care.
What are the organization's key strategies for making this happen?
AKB is the catalyzing force that organizes and aligns the major players in a state to come together across sectors to learn, innovate, and collaborate in solving the complex problems inherent in foster care and adoption. We then help launch state initiatives typically led by the governor's office in conjunction with churches, connected non profits, the creative community, and key business entities to spearhead recruitment and awareness efforts on a widespread scale. We also employ our signature, I Belong Project™ that enables children in foster care who are eligible for adoption to be the stars of their own stories. These kids are given a platform to share about themselves in high quality family recruitment videos. Finally we use our Dream Makers program to assist and support the vulnerable youth transitioning out of the foster care system.
What are the organization's capabilities for doing this?
Our capabilities for succeeding in our mission lie both in our strategic approach to solving the foster care crisis and in our personnel and key connections. Our staff and board members are highly connected and diverse in backgrounds and experiences that range from top level business leadership, to high government positions, to influential faith roles, to roles in child welfare. We also are connected to major creatives who are using their gifts to help frame this issue and inspire others to become involved. Our unique model was born out of marrying the grass roots method of adoptive and foster family recruitment in Colorado, the "grasstops" method of a governor’s office led adoption recruitment campaign in Virginia, and a business approach to the nonprofit sphere led by Joe Ritchie and his Fox River Team in Chicago.
How will they know if they are making progress?
One way is simply observing the numbers in the states we have a footprint in. Seeing an increase in adoptions, foster family recruitment numbers, and businesses and creatives becoming more involved would demonstrate tangible progress. Additionally seeing states' child welfare systems making helpful changes that streamline the licensing process and coordinating recruitment efforts more successfully would also show success in places where we are involved. More generally, seeing a culture develop across our country that sees the precious faces of youth in foster care with new and compassionate eyes would signal progress. We believe America's youth in foster care deserve "belonging" and we also believe our country has the resources and families already in place to provide it. In many cases, it's a matter of creating more awareness and better coordinated cross sector collaboration among leaders and influencers. When that happens we believe (and we've seen) significant change happen fast.
What have they accomplished so far and what's next?
In 2015, AKB worked behind the scenes to coordinate a multi-sector, multi-year campaign with the state of Oklahoma that organized the government, faith, creative, business and non-profit spheres around the issue of child welfare. In 2016, for the first time in the history of the Pinnacle Plan, OKDHS met and surpassed the foster family recruitment goal as 1,078 families were recruited. As part of this reform effort, parent certification time was cut in half and a group home was closed because of an influx of new foster parents. In 2016, AKB played a similar catalyzing role in a multi-sector approach to help bolster and improve Tennessee’s Foster Care System (TNFosters Initiative) and the state saw an increase of 42% in new foster families in the first year. In 2016, our I Belong Project™ produced 164 recruitment videos across five states. In 2017, 216 recruitment videos were produced. In 2018, we had 16 shoots with 207 kids to produce 183 videos in four states. From some sample groups of youth in foster care, we’ve seen a rate of about 50% of kids placed in pre-adoptive homes within a few months of having a video compared to no inquiries at all in some cases in the previous years. We envision taking these types of results into additional states. Currently AKB has expanded its national reach with 501(c)(3) affiliates in Tennessee and Virginia and state chapters in Colorado, South Dakota, Iowa, and Kansas. We're continuing to add additional states each year and currently have four states on the horizon to expand our operations into. We're also on pace this year to create 400 videos through our I Belong Project™ for youth across our country eligible to be adopted.
Ways to get involved/Volunteer Opportunities:
Visit their “Get Involved” page to learn how you can get involved. They facilitate several avenues to serve: Volunteering, Becoming an Ambassador, as a Business, as a Creative, Government + Faith based.
Here are a couple of simple ways to help:
Occasionally we have opportunities come up where we could use some help. This is often around the times of our monthly I Belong Project™ video shoots. Volunteers could be helpful with organizing new clothing donations, props for the shoot, set up, clean up, etc.
Please note that in order to attend a video shoot and work with the children there will be a background check completed, phone interview with one of our staff, and training day of event. We have a very limited number of spaces available for these opportunities.
Contact and love on your local DCS office. Social workers work long hours, have difficult caseloads and often feel “unseen”. Bring some treats by their office and thank them for the work they do.
Donate brand new clothing for our video shoots. The children get to pick out a new outfit if they desire and we watch their confidence level instantly boost! Find your nearest America’s Kids Belong chapter + donate to them.
Are you connected to a restaurant or business in your community? Consider asking this location to become “foster friendly”. Foster families change in size overnight, and it can make it tricky and expensive to have memberships to gyms, go out to eat, or shop. When companies offer discounts, acknowledging foster families, they feel seen and cared for, and this will give children in foster care the same opportunities as other children in the home. (gymnastics classes, dinners out, etc.)
Share a video of a waiting child from our site on your social media. Using your platform to help give these children a voice is one of the best ways you can give them more exposure, and ultimately, a family to call their own.
Think outside the box and tell us about it! We have had some of the most CREATIVE, INSPIRING ideas of how to serve children and families come from YOU. From a local woodworker donating tree swings to foster families, to benefit concerts, to real estate companies becoming involved because they see the value in HOME, we want to hear from you!