CFCS Begins Our New Foster Family Support Group
One of the ways we support the foster parents who care for children in our Intensive Foster Care (IFC) program is through foster family support groups. However, our support group sessions in the past have been under-attended, usually because we hosted them in locations that were difficult for most of our foster parents to get to. So our Family Resource Coordinator Nicole, who works with all our foster parents, recently had the bright idea to offer support groups closer to where our foster parents live, and to have the support groups hosted by the foster parents themselves. We want our foster parents to feel invested and to have ownership in their support groups, which are meant to be settings where they can strategize, share resources and think through problems with each other.
So on a recent sunny Saturday, we hosted our first Boston-area foster parent support group. Eight CFCS foster parents and Nicole all met at a fellow foster parent’s house. The group was a good mix of parents still in their first year of fostering, parents with many years of experience under their belts and parents in between. Some foster parents specialized in caring for babies, and some in caring for teens.
The conversation began to flow quite easily when the parents discovered that they all had more foster care stories in common than they initially thought! The group swapped local resource recommendations, talked about positive caregiving strategies and bonded over the challenges they’d shared. At the end of the day, everyone made plans to keep in touch. It was so great to see these wonderful foster families, who we work with on a daily basis individually, come together to laugh, vent and get to know each other!
Our IFC social workers work hard every day to make our foster parents feel supported, heard and advocated for, and to connect them to the resources they need to be good foster parents. But we also believe in the great value of peer support, especially when working in a field like foster care. When you’re a foster parent, sharing advice and guidance with other people who know exactly what you’re going through can be so valuable, and very healing.
We would like to extend a special thanks to the foster parent who hosted this support group session in her home. She really went above and beyond, offering a full spread of food, taking care to make everyone feel welcome and even organizing a raffle for the parents. We were blown away by her hostess skills!
This support group was for our families who live in Boston. We plan on starting groups for our families in Cambridge and the South Shore soon. We look forward to seeing how these support groups grow, and we can’t wait to see what new connections will come out of it!