Press release from Buncombe County:
Our community, our kids – this can resonate with everyone, especially during tough times such as COVID-19 quarantine. Can you imagine living an hour from your home and family? What about 3 hours from even the grocery store you recognize? Buncombe County Health and Human Services (BCHHS) is recruiting foster families for two new innovative programs, HIP and Lifeline, to bring our kids back home.
Amy Huntsman, foster home licensing supervisor states, “Children in our community have many barriers to face including school, food access, and social media. Imagine adding addiction, domestic violence and other forms of neglect or abuse, and a storm of trauma can be created that needs to be addressed in a way that will help promote healing and understanding. Foster care with BCHHS is currently looking at new strategies to recruit and support foster families in our home community that can keep our children right here. Right now, many children with high needs are placed outside of Buncombe due to a lack of available and trained homes to address their trauma and well-being needs. We believe this can change.”
HIP (High Intensity Placement) foster parents are level 1 foster parents with the desire and enhanced skills to ride out the tough initial placement of a child/children and continue to offer them support here in Buncombe County.
Lifeline, our second new program, serves to ensure the child is able to reside somewhere safe and nurturing while social services agencies work to find a more long-term solution, either with a relative, foster parent or other placement facility.HIP and Lifeline Foster Parents will have access to training around a trauma approach to parenting, crisis de-escalation and training specific to the needs of the child in their home. The department will offer access to 24 hour support, case management services, connection to fast clinical assessment, child mental health services, and financial incentives.
Foster parenting is hard, that fact is not lost on our agency or team. These new programs are designed to help the children of Buncombe County through placement stability and community connection. As members of the Buncombe County community, we all have a responsibility to the future of our youth. Be the change that helps a youth graduate high school. Be the change that reduces trauma to a second grader. Be the change that keeps four siblings in the same household or the same neighborhood. We can do it together.
If you are interested in learning more about Foster Parenting in Buncombe County or volunteering to help children in our community, please email amy.huntsman@buncombecounty.org or visitwww.buncombecounty.org/foster. You can also follow BCHHS on Facebook athttps://www.facebook.com/bchhs for social work stories from the field, job opportunities in social work, and for current health and safety information for Buncombe County.
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