With around 4,500 foster children in the nine Bay Area counties, according to ABC7news, the need for foster care resources is high; Help One Child is one of the organizations helping to meet this challenge. By supporting over 11,664 children, the organization not only provides services like connection groups, roundtable discussions, and donation drives, but also offers volunteer opportunities for members of the community to make a difference.
This faith-based initiative has provided childcare and resources to foster families in the Bay Area since 1993, when it was first founded by Mark and Joan Morris.
The couple’s own experiences as foster parents inspired this initiative: they found that the county had restricted respite support, overnight care or babysitting that left children with someone other than their licensed foster parents.
With foster parents unable to rely on external assistance, many foster parents are burnt out and in need of communal resources, according to South Bay Regional Manager Danielle Gruba. Help One Child intends to provide just that: foster families sharing meals and experiences, while providing respite for each other.
Contrary to its name, the organization provides care for more than just one child and does more than just serve as a space for encouragement. Tangible services like donation drives, eleven connection groups in the Bay, and monthly childcare are among the programs that Help One Child currently provides, Gruba said.
While Gruba wasn’t in foster care herself, her parents adopted an open-door policy when she was young, frequently offering their house as a place to stay for people like missionaries and youth group members. Her family’s substantial involvement in a communal support network instilled the understanding that it’s difficult for parents to take care of children alone.
“Families who are facing generational trauma, cyclical issues, and are under-resourced…only deepen the issue of isolation, which further deters families from having access to resources,” Gruba said.
At the heart of Help One Child’s mission is the goal to make connections and serve families of all backgrounds. To address the vastly different experiences families may have had, each of Help One Child’s services look pretty different from each other — some are geared towards parents, while others are towards kids.
While churches are a main pillar of support for volunteers and fundraising, Help One Child also partners with organizations, schools, and the county, including the Department of Child and Family Services.
Giving Tree, one form of tangible support, is a gifting drive hosted in five different counties to meet the relational needs of the community. Families that are in need of particular items can request gifts.
In Santa Clara County, for instance, 1300 gifts have been circulated around the area and will be dropped off at a Christmas shop location, Gruba said. These locations feature gift wrapping stations, hot cocoa and cookies to replicate the holiday atmosphere. Parents also have choices of picking out gifts like advent calendars or gift cards.
One of Help One Child’s largest initiatives is the Signs of Hope Camp. Every summer, the overnight camp is hosted at Mission Springs’ Frontier Ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains as a way for foster and adopted children to make connections with other campers and learn about God’s love and grace, according to the Help One Child website.
The camp is catered towards children and youth between ages 7-12. According to Grubas, around 50% of the campers are adopted or in foster care, 25% are in kinship care with relative caregivers, and roughly 25% are kids who have prior experience in foster care. With activities like swimming, ropes courses and bible club, the initiative runs off of the three pillars for camp: connection, respite, and exposure to the Gospel, according to the organization’s website.
As the camp runs on a large scale, with around 30 full time volunteers, 60-70 single day volunteers, and 4-5 staff members, planning begins in January, Gruba says. While camp costs are around sixty thousand a year, the camp is free for the children because of fundraising efforts and donors.
As many of the issues that volunteers may encounter are sensitive, Help One Child strives to provide training to volunteers. Gruba said she hopes that volunteers can “serve without hurting the population you’re serving”.
“It’s not uncommon for a 15-year-old to be defiant and have a 10-year-old size tantrum. Rather than deeming that child incapable…because of their behavior, [we should] tak[e] a more trauma-informed approach so the entire church or family can enjoy [the] community,” Gruba said.
In hopes of providing adaptive care, participant feedback is taken to account for all Help One Child programs, every six months. This means that after every event and program, the organization sends out surveys to understand the parts of the procedure that need to be revised. Help One Child also creates annual data reports to aid in understanding their mission and approach, including questions like the type of family they’re living in and annual family intake.
Since Help One Child is a faith-based nonprofit, collaboration with churches is a core part of its operation; aside from Giving Tree, another example of this partnership is the programParents Night Out. At Parents Night Out, trained volunteers run activities for foster children, allowing foster families to recuperate for around three hours.
“My favorite thing to ask parents as they drop their kids off, is ‘What are you planning for the evening?’ Sometimes, it’s as simple as ‘I’m going home to clean the house without any interruption,’ and sometimes it’s ‘I’m going to have a date night,’” Gruba said.
Not only are these moments invaluable to foster parents, but also provide a community for the foster children themselves.
“The kids that attend often don’t seem themselves in day-to-day interactions. So, you often feel like you’re the only one who could possibly be going through [traumatic experiences],” Gruba said. “I have heard them talk to their parents about the realization that everybody has a mom and dad and nobody has experienced being moved to a stranger’s house.”
Rather than having children shoulder these thoughts themselves, Help One Child’s services provide open and transparent conversations where commonly shared experiences among foster families are discussed. By acknowledging that their experiences aren’t idiosyncratic, the foster families are “seen and validated,” Gruba said.
In addition to these operational support programs, Help One Child also offers education opportunities for foster parents to learn about self-care techniques specific to being foster parents.
Gruba envisions Help One Child to be a stepping stone towards increasing awareness and understanding of foster and adoptive families. An integral part of her time at Help One Child has been witnessing the growth of the children they serve.
Gruba shared one of her memorable success stories: a mom that used Help One Child’s services weekly said that her adopted son, who was kicked out of school, relied on Help One Child’s support groups to take breaks during those times. Now, years later, her son has graduated high school, landed a job, and is heading to college in Arizona.
“That’s my favorite part. It’s not going to be a difference in a day, but I’m lucky that I was able to witness this outcome in the nine years I’ve been with Help One Child,” Gruba said. “My compassion and empathy, especially for women who are fighting to get their kids back from foster care, has just continued to grow.”
