Throughout National Foster Care Month, we’re sharing “Blessings Found in Fostering.” We’ve asked Encourage families and staff to tell us what they’re learning and the God moments they’ve seen along the way. Today’s story of blessing comes from Courtney McConahay, one of our foster care coordinators. Courtney cheers on our foster youth wherever they are in the journey. I just have to brag on one of our foster teen boys. I was concerned about him at first, for building up his m

Throughout National Foster Care Month, we’ll be sharing “Blessings Found in Fostering.” We’ve asked Encourage families and staff to tell us what they’re learning and the God moments they’ve seen along the way. Today on the blog, seasoned foster parents Kathy and Bryant Smith share their heart to foster through faith. They are intentional about modeling God’s love in words and actions. Through the years, they have watched little seeds grow. We have been foster parents for many

This summer, Encourage Foster Care offered Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) training to all of our foster families. TBRI was developed at Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development at Texas Christian University, which defines TBRI as “an attachment-based, trauma-informed intervention that is designed to meet the complex needs of vulnerable children. While the intervention is based on years of attachment, sensory-processing and neuroscience research, the heartbeat o

Earlier this month, Encourage welcomed Rebecca Ryder, MA, NCC, LPCC-S, Managing Clinical Supervisor for Encompass East Counseling to present at our First Friday training for foster parents. Her topic for the evening, Myers-Briggs: Is It Me?, engaged parents on how our unique personalities impact our parenting styles. She shared such valuable information on connection and communication that we asked her to condense her talk into a blog post for all of you. We hope you enjoy it

This blog post was originally published in January 2016. The truth of it remains the same so we are sharing it again to bring you encouragement for the journey. My husband and I have had the privilege of providing foster care to fifteen children since 2010. We have three little boys right now who are six, five, and three. Last week one of our little boys told me he really wished he had some orange pants. Now, when he first came to our home, you could barely understand a word

Encourage’s director, Shawn Pedani, LISW-S, reflects on what makes a foster parent successful. “So, why are you here? What are your expectations?” Following introductions, these are the very first questions I ask all the folks who attend Encourage’s Foster Parent 101: Orientation. The class breaks up into small groups and participants introduce themselves and share why they’ve chosen to attend. Looking around the room I see husbands rubbing their sweaty foreheads and wives le

Faith is an integral part of our culture at Encourage. Sometimes the faith component in fostering starts as a gentle nudge. A knock at your heart’s door that God desires to take you down a new path of knowing and serving Him. Other times faith shows up as reminder of God’s call to the church to care for those who are alone and in need. Always the faith component in fostering entails loving deeply through the hard times. Embracing a child with all of his or her trauma and beau

People often have a negative perception of children in foster care. Just because these children come from hard places and have experienced hard things, doesn’t mean they aren’t also great kids. When you hear about children in foster care, you often hear the worst stories about the abuse and neglect that they have endured. Encourage’s kids are resilient with many brilliant qualities. You might learn in the news what they’ve experienced, but these articles don’t share that they