Josiah White’s is excited to announce the launch of its new Intensive Foster Care program, which will serve as an expansion of their current family services offerings. The program, which started on November 1st, provides support to foster and kinship homes serving children and teens with high needs.
Josiah White’s Foster Care and Family Preservation teams will be working together on these cases with three goals in mind:
- Placement stability: provide caregivers with support to reduce the likelihood of the child having the leave the home
- Child safety: prioritize each child’s wellbeing through careful oversight and the tracking of incident reports
- Time to permanency: create a faster route to reunification or adoption with the ultimate goal of providing these children and teens with secure, loving homes
Josiah White’s is always seeking the best ways to serve children, teens, and families across our state. The organization has recognized the need for services like Intensive Foster Care for the past few years, and when the opportunity to expand in this area presented itself, it checked all the boxes of the needs the leadership and staff were already aware of.
“Unfortunately, the children with greater needs are more likely to experience multiple moves, multiplying trauma and making healthy attachment a struggle,” said Kurt Gard, Vice President and Executive Director of Family Services. “Intensive foster care is an opportunity to fight against that experience. It equates to an increase in the resources provided to the family caring for the child and an expansion of available services to the child within one cohesive team. As Josiah White’s provides this program, it is also an opportunity to reach more through the love of Christ and let Him be known to all.”
Josiah White’s is one of 13 agencies throughout the state of Indiana with an Intensive Foster Care program. The organization is working to build capacity for this program across the state.
Referrals for these placements may involve longer conversations than normal to ensure the best fit for the child and their potential foster or kinship family. The families that accept these placements will receive a higher per diem to help them provide their foster child(ren) with the additional services they may need.
Josiah White’s urges Christians to consider making an eternal impact by becoming a foster parent. There are significantly more children in need of foster homes than there are available foster parents. For more information on becoming a foster parent, please visit josiahwhites.org/foster-a-child.
