Keeping Families Connected, One Visit at a Time

Even more disheartening, perhaps, was the realization that siblings separated in foster care were struggling to maintain connections with each other if the bio parent visits were not taking place. Last minute canceled visits when a supervisor did not follow through for a family was also causing confusion for the children involved, along with escalating behaviors in their foster homes that could lead the foster parents to have the children moved to another home. After recognizing this unmet, rather than complain about the problem, I chose to become a part of the solution. In doing so, All For Family was born.

When I first began All For Family, on October 9th, 2018, I was initially met with resistance. Those working in the foster care field did not believe that the idea of recruiting volunteers from the community, and training them to supervise family visits, would never work because, according to the Children Division, it had never been done. All For Family recently celebrated our 6th anniversary. In that time, we have seen several families successfully reunite, several others progress toward enough unsupervised time to not require our services, and even bio fathers who were awarded joint custody of their children. What we were told couldn’t be done has now become a beacon of hope to the families we serve in the Jefferson County community.

A little over a year ago, we added therapeutic visits to our list of provided services, as well. At All For Family, we strongly feel that poverty should never keep families apart. For this reason, we offer a sliding fee scale for services. Under this scale, at least 90% of our clientele have qualified for free supervised family visits – a service they are not finding anywhere else, outside of visits supervised by their caseworker, a friend of theirs, or a family member.

Beyond the services listed above, we have also previously held foster parent training events, foster parent recruitment events, and we place foster parent “survival/training” kits in every library branch in Jefferson County.

I cannot take all of the credit for our success; however, we have had amazing volunteers along the way, a wonderful team of board members, with Darrell Missey being one of our founding board members, and the most wonderful Office Manager we could ask for. Our success has also been thanks to our faithful sponsors, donations we receive, and grants we have been blessed by Jefferson Foundation.

This has been a journey of hard work, stress, self-doubt, and reflection. However, the heartfelt gratitudes our families share with us, along with hearing their success stories of reunification, has made it all worthwhile.

All For Family, however, has a very pressing, urgent need of support. We need you! We have recently lost several of our most faithful volunteers due to medical and other reasons.

We are in desperate need of more active volunteer visit supervisors. 

Our volunteer based visit program is in jeopardy of having to shut down if we are unsuccessful in recruiting more active volunteers. Our primary needs are for evenings and weekends at both our Arnold and Hillsboro visit locations. If you have a couple of hours you can spare to sit with a family while they play and interact with one another, we could really use the donation of your time.