Encourage Foster Care provides trauma-informed training and supportive services to foster and foster-to-adopt families. We specialize in treatment foster care and prioritize sibling groups, older children, teens, and children with medical needs. Our heart is for these youth to experience safety and connection.
When a child or teen needs emergency care due to a crisis in their home, placement with the child’s family member or a person whom the child knows (also known as kinship placement) is always the preferred option. When kinship placement isn’t possible, the second choice is placement in a family foster home within their county. If the youth or siblings cannot be placed with a family member or with a family foster home in their local area, a treatment foster home becomes the next choice. These are the children we serve at Encourage.
Families with a treatment foster care license are equipped to meet unique needs like caring for sibling groups in order to keep siblings together or providing for the higher-level needs of children or teens who have medical, emotional and/or behavioral issues. This could range from asthma, diabetes or ADHD to more challenging medical and behavioral needs such as cerebral palsy, pre-natal exposure to drugs or alcohol, or behaviors related to a youth’s prior trauma.
A treatment foster care license is more focused than a traditional foster care license. Foster and foster-to-adopt families must meet certain criteria to qualify, including one of the following: have five years of parenting experience, receive 24-hours of additional foster parent training, or have experience caring for a child in foster care for 365 consecutive days. Encourage provides the additional 24-hours of training to all of our treatment foster families with a focus on trauma-informed approaches.
Our next blog post will share more about what a youth with high-level needs looks like and how Encourage trains treatment foster families from a trauma-informed approach.
