The Jamaica Community Partnership Initiative Foster Care and Child Welfare Conference
Allen AME has championed foster parent recruitment by outreach to its congregation and training prospective parents in foster care. Indeed, it has expanded its foster care ministry to include recruitment, training and support counseling; providing an outstanding complement of services to nurture those who want to open their hearts and homes to children who have entered the child welfare system. Thus far, the Jamaica CPI has trained seventeen new foster parents and a new class began in May 2008 to add more foster families. Reverends Helen and Andre Broady, who lead the Allen AME Foster Care Ministry are also Forestdale foster parents and they conduct recruitment, training and counseling for CPI.
The conference is a one-day event to acquaint faith organizations in Queens with foster parenting and child welfare issues. Our objective is to herald the importance of foster parenting and the leadership of Allen AME in embracing foster parent recruitment and child welfare as social justice issues. We want more residents in the borough to understand the public policy implications of child welfare; and at the same time, we want to encourage other religious institutions to adopt foster care as a ministry. We want the faith-based community to know its participation and support is essential to achieving cultural competency for foster children as their organizations most often reflect the ethnic fabric of the neighborhoods in which they reside. Religious institutions are key to motivating local residents to add value to the child welfare system by individual action. While not everyone can be a foster parent, they can have other roles to support foster children. Respite care and grand parenting, in particular, are other forms of participation that we want to explore in the conference proceedings through workshops. Also, residents can participate in family team conferencing. There are a myriad of opportunities we can identify through the collective wisdom of a conference.
The goals of the conference are:
- Advance learning about the imperatives of child welfare in Queens as a public policy issue that is important to communities of color.
- Encourage more religious institutions to have foster care ministries.
- Change the demographic profile of foster parents to include more middle class families.
- Launch a movement focused on foster care as a social and economic justice issue.
