Let us support your Church
Support carers
Setting up communities of support around carers
Safe communities
Training for church and ministry teams
Trauma informed
Trauma informed training and support
Promotion
Communication and promotions
Support foster carers in your church community
We believe the Church is ideally placed to ensure that every child and young person has the loving home they need. We are called to care for the vulnerable, extend hospitality, love their neighbours, and be salt and light in their communities.
Fostering Hope can support your community
understand the call to visit and care for at-risk children, understand the life of a carer, understand the impact of complex developmental trauma, and become places of healing, understanding and hope.
It is powerful for children to not only receive love and acceptance in a stable home, but also from a whole community. As everyone learns about the needs of vulnerable children and vulnerable families their eyes are opened to the needs of their community, their neighbours, and what their role could be.
We hope you will open your congregations to children in care and the families opening their homes to them and help them provide the best homes possible to foster hope.
Through loving a vulnerable child, a ripple effect can permeate through a family, church community, school, and for eternity. God calls everyday people to be foster and kinship carers, people just like you and me, but through that call He shows everyone around the family and child love in action.
We pray you will open your congregations to children in care and the families opening their homes to them and help them provide the best homes possible to foster hope.
God’s concern for orphans and the fatherless is explicitly stated at least forty times in the Bible.
God makes clear his unchanging desire that his people should look out for the lowest and least, commands us to "defend the weak and the fatherless and that Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after the orphans and widows in their distress." James 1:27
Support foster carers in your church community
Stepping into foster, kinship care, or informal care is completely different to raising your own biological children. It takes a village to raise any child, for children in care, this is especially the case. Carers are navigating the needs of the children in their home as well as birth family situations and working within a government department with expectations and needs.
Fostering Hope would love to see communities in Australia wrap around carers and their children. We can provide mentors, respite carers, tutors, practical support, prayer, and other needs.
Trauma informed training
Fostering Hope delivers trauma awareness training so your space can be safe for all children. We highly recommend this for all children and youth group workers and volunteers. Our training allows leaders of all ages to better understand some of the underlying issues that may have embedded trauma within a child, and the behvioural triggers that are often a result of that trauma.
We will try and fit the training to work within your teams requirements.
Ensuring your church is Child safe
Fostering Hope works in response to the brokenness in the world that leads children to being removed from their families and in need of care. In doing this we need to learn from the mistakes of the past and ensure that Fostering Hope foster and kinship carers, and their church communities, are safe, nurturing, and healing places for vulnerable children.
A key way of achieving this is for each church to understand and take seriously the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations (National Principles), adapting them to suit your own program and context.
Promoting the cause
There are many ways a Church can support Fostering Hope in raising awareness of the needs of children in out of home care and promoting opportunities for the congregation to get involved.
This can simply be a commitment to praying regular for the children, for the carers, for the birth parents, and for the many other services and authorities responsible for managing the system. Including the needs of foster care in any weekly news letter or church wide communication is another simple way to maintain awareness.
We have a range of brochures and posters available that we can provide to you that could remain accessible and on display as a visual reminder and information touch point for anyone interested in finding out more.
Your church could partner with us as part of your missions focus.
Participating with us in the global Stand Sunday initiative every year.