When you enter foster care, you lose everything… parents, home, friends, and the feeling of attachment to community. Even one’s culture and identity seem to disappear. All too often, children in the child welfare system are also separated from their siblings. Sadly, some siblings are adopted into different families and many lose contact with each other. Everything becomes unfamiliar the moment a child is removed from their home. They experience a great deal of pain, anxiety, guilt, grief and loss of identity when they enter the foster care system. Research suggests that siblings placed together experience a lower risk of failed placements, companionship, and maintain many emotional benefits. Siblings placed together often feel more secure and are able to help each other adjust to their new family and community. Approximately two-thirds of children in foster care in the United States have a sibling in care and many of these children will be separated from their siblings. A common reason given for these separations is that workers aren’t able to find a permanent placement for all of the siblings together.
I’m happy to announce that GHH Redlands has siblings living in our foster home. They range from age 3 to12. It’s been an amazing two-year journey of chasing my calling to provide a family-like environment for foster children who deserve nothing less. What I’ve learned through this season is that motivation isn’t permanent. It is renewed each day. Vision isn’t indefinite. It is cast each morning. Discipline isn’t owned. It is fought for by the minute. And dreams are not free. They are realized by ruthless individuals who refuse to give up. In times of testing, it’s easy to lose sight of why you started. It’s easy to lose confidence in your ideas. During this journey, I realized that our fortitude is never for our benefit, but the benefit of others. Giving up isn’t about the change that would occur in our life, rather it’s the end of what our life was going to do, going to change, going to fix, or going to stop. And what I can say confidently after all that we’ve been through so far is that we aren’t going to give up; doors are opening and GHH is going to accomplish so much more for foster kids as we push forward. Watch what happens next as we continue to BUILD GENESIS.