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I knew I could have a tangible, meaningful, and positive impact through the beauty of my artful designs. When you purchase any items from our House Collection, we donate 100% of the purchase price to Foster Village Charlotte. Your purchase supports the work of Foster Village Charlotte, which ultimately impacts those who need it the most. My hope is the Safety Pin House serves as a reminder that when we all come together, children can have a safe place to call home.
OUR MISSION
Foster Village is a “village of villages,” with locations all around the country. Our goal is to be in every community where there is a need. Find the location nearest you to discover how you can get involved. The Village Partner Community creates pathways of consistency, allowing Foster Village Charlotte to plan forward with vision and confidence for sustainability and scalability. We invite you to become part of this transformative journey.
Meeting needs. Bringing dignity to the system.
Copyright © 2024 Next Stage Consulting All rights reserved. I asked the leader of Foster Village there if she would consider an affiliation model. But she kept checking on us and eventually agreed to let us use her logo and brand. That allowed us to point back to something that was already working elsewhere.
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Rainy Day Activities for Kids in Charlotte
Abused and neglected children lingered in bad situations. But Becky Santoro and her team at Foster Village Charlotte, a nonprofit that provides support for foster families, were prepared to act. In just the Charlotte-Mecklenburg region there are currently close to 600 kids in the foster care system. Over six months, they ramped up support groups, hosted meetings with the Mecklenburg County Department of Social Services, and doubled the number of first-time donors. Seventy percent of our organization is run by individual donations. We’re trying to show that everybody can impact foster care, not just foster parents.
Safety Pin House
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After Maeve was born, Tony started roasting coffee in the backyard and selling it to friends and family for fun. This went on for a couple of years, through the birth of our second daughter, Raeya. Create professional content with Canva, including presentations, catalogs, and more. Transform any piece of content into a page-turning experience.
I would have loved for my (foster) children’s father to have access to a home-like setting like our current resource center in the Oakhurst neighborhood. We hope to open a larger resource center so we can provide more intentional programming around the foster and biological family on their road home. When Raeya was 6 months old, we both left teaching. I took a job at Watershed, working in the children’s program. During that time, I said to Tony, “Let’s do foster care.” Looking back, that did not feel like the right time to start something new. Tony was starting his business, I was in a new job, we had little kids.
We taught together at Merry Oaks Elementary for a couple of years. It wasn’t easy—we worked 80-hour weeks—but we loved those kids and families so much. Visit fostervillagecharlotte.org or facebook.com/fostervillagecharlotte for more information and ways to get involved. If you are already a full-access volunteer (background check, training, childcare webinar training completed) the portal is a great way to have all up-to-date information in one place! Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Who works and leads organizations that serve our diverse communities?
Even though you are already experiencing toxic stress, being placed somewhere new adds additional levels of trauma. You find yourself without a familiar face, in an unknown setting, without a single belonging. Support during the Resource Development module turned out to be particularly helpful for the organization. “During our time in Cultivate, we launched a peer-to-peer campaign that would leverage this groundswell of support.
Project SOOTHe provides non-invasive tools, play-based strategies, and individualized consultations to families free of charge to help caregivers engage and bond with the children in their homes. Forms can be filled out on our website by caregivers and our licensed pediatric Occupational Therapist and current foster parent calls to schedule a consultation. After a consultation, a follow-up email is provided that recaps the visit and suggests play-based strategies for the sensory tools that will be delivered. One of the things that brought us together was our mutual desire to support children in foster care.
My experience in the classroom had a lot to do with why I became a foster parent. I had students who were in foster care, living with extended family or foster parents. Watching grandparents struggle to parent again, or having a conversation with kids and not getting a clear picture of where they were living, or with whom … changed me. Tony and I started gathering information about foster care before we started a family. COVID delivered a blow to an already strained foster care system. Therapy and support service availability dwindled.
Foster Village Charlotte’s mission is to make that transition easier and provide resources and support for children and families. The journey is often lonely and emotionally exhausting for everyone involved. It was this challenge that prompted four Charlotte-based foster moms to seek out support during their own foster care journeys. After finding each other, they quickly realized the need for a community of support that would ensure every foster parent had the resources they needed to continue offering a safe place for children. Today, even with the disruption of the pandemic, Foster Village thrives.
Foster Village operates on an annual budget of about $350,000, 70% of which comes from individual donations. It occupies a small house in the Oakhurst neighborhood in southeast Charlotte, but Santoro hopes she can raise enough money for a new resource center by the end of 2023. A new center would allow for more comfortable interactions between children and caregivers at sensitive and emotionally charged times, like when foster children reunite with their birth families. It is this ‘village,’ alongside a real community need that has fueled Foster Village’s momentum.
So I created a website, wrote up my story, and asked family and friends to give me 18 months to dedicate myself to Foster Village. I needed $2,500 per month to make day care payments. The social worker brought me to the hospital where the child was, and I met with police officers, doctors, and the father—a very out-of-body experience.
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