Eastern Washington University’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Social Work (CSBSSW), which is receiving over $1.2 million in contract funding from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services over the next two years, recently created a peer mentoring program, FosteringWA to help educate and support current and prospective foster parents.
The college’s Idaho Child Welfare Research and Training Center will manage FosteringWA and adapt its Recruiter Peer Mentor (RPM) program to it. Kim Fordham, the program’s director, said the training center created the RPM to support and meet the needs of Idaho families as well as develop strategies on the recruitment and retention of foster parents as well as focus on the needs of local children.
Mentors, who are often experienced foster parents, will help families on practicing the best principles, roles and responsibilities. They also help with the assessment, selection, preparation and placement of foster children. The program takes a regional and local approach in that RPMs will personally visit families.
Since 2007, the RPM has helped increase the demand for foster parent training by 60 percent throughout Idaho.
“The peer mentors do a lot of mentoring and support,” Fordham said. “RPMs also help foster parents with challenges, whether it’s troubled kids, the birth parents or when foster children leave the home and move on.”
With the program’s success in Idaho, Fordham proposed the idea of building a grass roots program in Eastern Washington to meet the needs of local families. FosteringWA’s office is located in Senior Hall on the EWU campus and there are RPMs working in different areas throughout Washington state.
Fordham said the program is going well so far and the “RPMs are keeping the wheels turning,” “The program now is fully staffed,” Fordham said. “I feel like the foundation is built.”
Fordham added that the community has gotten behind FosteringWA. She hopes to make sure the program has RPMs and staff is “where they need to be.”
“We’re hoping we can have RPMs in areas where there are monolingual families and only speak one language,” Fordham said. “We want to make sure we can accommodate those, and nurturing those folks to become good foster parents and leaders.”
In the long term, Fordham hopes the program can help increase the number of foster parents and help them navigate the system.
“We want to bring them in and show them what being a foster parent is like and some of the challenges that come with it,” Fordham said. “With more foster parents, we’d be able to pair them with kids that would be a good match for them.”
Eastern is continuing to help foster families and children. They recently established the Dru Powers MSW Child Welfare Scholarship, as to honor Powers’ contributions to foster children and families and her ongoing work to improve the foster care system in Washington state.
“It’s amazing knowing how EWU is invested in helping foster kids and getting behind these programs,” Fordham said.
Al Stover can be reached at al@cheneyfreepress.com.
Reader Comments(0)