Celebrating Our 7th Anniversary

Thank you to everyone who helped make this possible!

On October 9th, All For Family celebrated our 7th Anniversary as an official non-profit, though the idea for All For Family was born at least a couple of years prior to this momentous occasion.

When All For Family was in the beginning phases, so many believed the vision we had, to recruit and train community volunteers to supervise family visits, would not be possible. So many believed that we would likely never make it past our first year.

However, due the special thanks of our sponsors, volunteers, board members, therapists, staff members, donations, and grant funding, we have now reached our 7th year.

During our 7 years of providing supervised family visits, we went from providing visits in places like libraries and McDonalds, to a very small office space, and now, to not one, but two leased visit spaces (Exchange Church in Arnold and Hillsboro United Methodist Church). Both of our visit locations have outdoor playgrounds, both have a visit room stocked with toys, games, and books to facilitate positive parent/child interactions, and both have access to a kitchen. In our visit locations, we have witnessed the beauty of parents working side by side their children in the kitchen making cupcakes or putting together a healthy family dinner, just as any typical family would. With access to such a consistent, clean location, parents do not have to worry about rearranging their plans due to weather, unless, of course, the roads are not safe, and they do not have to spend what little money they have to provide entertainment for their children like they would if they were in public settings.

With the sliding fee scale All For Family provides, thanks to grant funding and donations we receive from caring people like you, we have removed poverty as a barrier for access to court ordered supervised family visits for children in foster care. With consistent weekly visits, we have made it possible for siblings separated in care to have more consistent contact with one another, and, for the past two years, we have also provided families with low to zero cost therapeutic family visits.

Through the programs we provide, we have witnessed multiple families successfully reunite and/or progress toward receiving enough unsupervised visit time that they no longer needed our services. We have helped connect families with community resources to help them secure and set up suitable housing, and we have provided training support and resources for foster parents as well. All of our amazing progress has been a direct result of the support from all of you.

However, even as we celebrate the success of our 7th year anniversary, we do so with saddened and troubled hearts. This past year, we have seen an increase in a need for therapeutic visits, and a decrease in referrals for our traditional visit program. This increase resulted in All For Family running out of grant funding for this program months before we had anticipated. We recently had to reject a referral for our therapeutic visit program simply due to this lapse of funding. In addition to this unexpected change in referrals, our liability insurance more than doubled this past year as well, and we also learned that Children's Division can no longer run our volunteer background checks for us, which creates yet another unexpected cost.

Despite these changes, our goal to provide free to low cost supervised family visits to children in foster care remains unchanged. This continued mission, however, can only be made possible with your continued help and support.

In the coming weeks, we will be sharing how you can help continue our mission. For now, we would like to sincerely thank you for all of the amazing help and support you have provided us over the years. We would also like to share, for anyone who may have a need for an active foster care case, our traditional, volunteer based, supervised family visit program has immediate openings at both our Arnold and Hillsboro locations. Please feel free to email us at info@allforfamily.net for more information.

All For Family remains committed to serving the foster care community in Jefferson County and surrounding counties.