This article part of our series looking at the Invisible Social Safety Net — all of those houses of worship and faith-based organizations that provide essential social services to their communities, sometimes with the help of government funding and sometimes without that assistance. In order to unleash the power of the social safety net to support our most vulnerable neighbors, CPJ advocates for state, local, and federal governments who need to understand how to partner with and support these “invisible” links who serve not because they have to by law, but because faithfulness to their tradition calls them to serve.
When Promise686 CEO and president Andy Cook says his team is building a mission-focused tech company, your mind might jump to Silicon Valley platitudes about the power of technology to reshape the world for good. When he says they’re working hand in hand with the government, you might think of tech startups hunting for lucrative federal contracts. But for Cook and his team, the mission is child welfare.
Founded in 2007, Promise686 is a Georgia-based non-profit that equips churches and community groups to provide safe and healthy homes for children in the foster care system. Inspired by Psalm 68:6’s claim that “God places the lonely in families,” Promise686 has trained thousands of churches to start foster care ministries and improved measurable outcomes for foster children and families alike. Its recruitment and above-average retention of foster families makes it a valuable partner for state, federal and tribal agencies across the United States, many of which are overwhelmed and struggling to provide adequate care for children in their custody. Promise686 is transforming church-based foster care ministry in service of kids across the United States and demonstrating that faith-based organizations can be indispensable partners in the social safety net.
There are currently 10,482 children in Georgia’s foster care system, according to the most recent data from the state’s Department of Human Services. These children are living with relatives, in a group home or with a foster family with the ultimate aim of family reunification. However, some children age out of the system before that can happen. In Georgia, 10% of children leaving foster care are doing so because they turn 18, leaving them to find their own way regardless of whether they have family prepared to help them or not. As a result, research has shown that more than one-fifth of youth who leave foster care experience homelessness at some point in their first year out.
When I spoke with him, Cook was quick to say that the issue of child welfare is too complex for community organizations like Promise686 to handle alone. For example, state-funded social workers provide invaluable clinical expertise during difficult decisions to remove children from homes. Social workers are also adept at navigating the complicated bureaucracies that provide wraparound services to struggling families. In cases where a single social worker stays assigned to a child’s case, that child is four times as likely to achieve permanency in a stable home compared to a child cycled between multiple case workers.
Because social workers are critical allies for Promise686, so the nonprofit facilitates a National Hospitality Week campaign to thank social workers as first responders through notes of encouragement, gift baskets and public recognition. Cook said the campaign aligns with their goal of supporting children “[because] we want social workers to stick around their jobs because they have a sense of being honored and valued. And we wanted them to know that we were for them, so that we could work together with them.”
It may already be clear to some how churches, families and civil society can care for foster children. But more broadly, the state should also recognize its role to create conditions where children and families can thrive. For example, the Center for Disease Control recognizes many non-medical factors that impact a person’s health, like economic stability, educational access and clean neighborhoods. These social determinants of health are greatly impacted by state policies, demonstrating that good governance has a role to play in child welfare.
Additionally, the state is empowered to prosecute those who harm children through abuse, neglect or exploitation. Law enforcement, oversight bodies and the criminal justice system should protect children as the most vulnerable in society. Unfortunately, state agencies often fall short of this mandate to protect children from harm. An investigation conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee recently confirmed previous findings that Georgia’s Department of Family and Child Services (DFCS) routinely fails children in its care through neglect, abuse overmedication, and lack of oversight.
In these situations, citizens must hold the government accountable to its mandate to promote the welfare of children and families. In addition to the trauma borne by children, a failure of preventative care for foster children creates future costs for health care, housing and other social services when they age out of the system.
But biblical frameworks of public justice take a broader perspective than just material provision for all. Canadian theologian Ron Sider points out that the Bible refers to the poor as being at risk of “falling out of the community”, with Leviticus 25:35 reading, “If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and are unable to support themselves among you, help them… so they can continue to live among you.” There are social aspects of poverty that are manifest when foster children and their families are not adequately connected or empowered to participate fully in their communities.
Churches were an unseen but important part of the state’s child welfare system.
As CPJ’s Guidelines on the Family note, “public policy should, therefore, take carefully into account the ways that other institutions and the dynamics of society impact families positively and negatively from the earliest stages of family formation on through to the last stages of elder care.” An effective social safety net will provide relational and spiritual assistance in addition to material assistance. But governments are not well suited to provide for the relational and spiritual aspects of child welfare, leaving churches and community organizations to step more fully into their own roles as a critical but often unseen part of the social safety net.
Church-based volunteers, or “Family Advocacy Ministries” (FAMs), are at the heart of Promise686’s model to recruit and support foster parents. While creating homes for the more than 400,000 foster children in the United States is a daunting task, there are over 300,000 churches that could collectively empty the foster care system by supporting a single family in their congregation. Promise686 decided to put churches at the heart of their model after they calculated that local churches with foster care ministries were each contributing about $10,000 in economic impact every year through volunteering, in-kind donations and preventative services that kept children out of foster care. Churches were an unseen but important part of the state’s child welfare system.
One of the reasons Promise686’s FAM model is so effective is that it has harnessed the power of technology to recruit, train and support thousands of FAMs. Today its software delivers training curricula for new foster families, connects churches with the physical needs of local families and simplifies volunteer management to lower the barrier to entry for churches that want to start their own foster care ministry.
Promise686 licenses its software to local implementing organizations, allowing them to utilize their existing connections and credibility in the community to recruit foster families. “The big idea, of course, is that if you can go into a church and train them to own and operate their own ministry, if you can pour enough curriculum, software and coaching into them, they can be transformative in their community,” Cook said. As a result of the partnerships, Promise686 now works with over 2,000 churches in 40 states.
As successful as Promise686’s model has been, Cook says everyone involved in the child welfare system understands that no one church or organization is the solution, much less a replacement for the government. For Cook, partnerships between state agencies and organizations like Promise686 was obvious. “I just always felt like our role was to bring our best, which was people, and their role was to bring their best, which is really policy and processes.”
One such partnership is CarePortal, a platform created by the Global Orphan Project that allows government social workers, educators and child welfare professionals to connect families in need with churches and community members that can meet those needs. As CarePortal’s local implementer in Georgia and Montana, Promise686 trains state employees to submit needs they encounter, be it furniture for a mother and her children fleeing an abusive partner or temporary transportation to allow a father to keep his job and avoid eviction for his family. This partnership between Promise686 and the state, through CarePortal, enables churches to provide preventative support that keeps children out of the foster care system.
As successful as Promise686’s model has been, Cook says everyone involved in the child welfare system understands that no one church or organization is the solution, much less a replacement for the government.
Promise686 and nonprofits like it also collect data on child and family outcomes that can be used to inform policymakers at the federal, tribal and state levels. Cook hopes to see more proactive data sharing in the future, as Promise686’s metrics are already compatible with the national Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System’s standards. In the future, Promise686 could provide child welfare officials with direct access to secure data that demonstrates whether children and families cared for by their church-based model have better outcomes than usual.
In the current American political climate, skepticism over religion in the public square has led to mistrust and innate skepticism of faith-based organizations receiving government funding or providing social services in conjunction with the state. But where child welfare is concerned, Cook has found state officials very open to cooperation with Promise686 and its partner churches.
In fact, it’s sometimes faith-based organizations that inadvertently undermine partnership opportunities through their messaging that churches are the ultimate solution for child welfare in the foster care system. “It will take a lot of solutions,” Cook says, “and if we convey that there’s only one solution then we’re exhibiting a level of disrespect or lack of appreciation of whoever the other person is in the space. And that’s really not good for collaboration at the end of the day.”
Early on in Promise686’s outreach to county governments, a county worker expressed surprise that Promise686 returned repeatedly. Cook said her reason stung. “Churches are great at showing up once,” she said. Consistency is key for faith-based organizations and church ministries trying to build credibility with government partners.
Because a single approach is not sufficient for the complex world of child welfare, it’s vital that civil society and government develop integrated strategies where each fulfills its proper role and draws on its unique resources. As Promise686 expands its partnerships across the country, Cook is confident there will always be a desire for public-private partnership toward child welfare. “The primary asset of the foster care system is families,” Cook said. “And the government does not have families.”
Mark Sawyer is an open-source researcher and freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of Wheaton College (IL), where he studied international relations and urban studies.
