Where Serving is a pleasure.
Paula Smith from City Church in Sanford understands that child welfare case managers are fighting an uphill battle. “It’s such a hard job, physically and emotionally,” Paula explains, “and they basically have no time or bandwidth to truly take care of themselves. They are often pictured out to be the bad guys, or that they don’t care enough, but truly they are just tired and overworked and have so many plates spinning. Their jobs are heavy and that’s why they have such high turnover. It’s only right for the church to step in and love on them.”
Paula’s bible study decided that they wanted to find a way to encourage local case managers. Paula reached out to Laura who is the manager for the Seminole County Diversion team. Laura shared each of the diversion specialists’ “favorite things” lists. “Laura was so happy when I first reached out,” Paula recalls, “and was so thankful to have people wanting to love on her team.
She provided such great information to better tailor the packages for her team and a lot of good ideas of extra things we could add that would be useful. She was so appreciative upon receiving the packages and expressed her gratitude many times.”
Little did Paula know how her experience would inspire others to encourage case managers.
Paula shared about this experience at the Commission 127 Family Advocacy Ministry (FAM) Leader gathering. Inspired by her story, Nicole Furniss, an advocate with St. Luke’s Lutheran Church in Oviedo, reached out to her FAM specialist, Christine Colon, to ask for help serving the case managers working near her church.
The only problem was that, since both churches are located in Seminole County, there was not another child welfare team that C17 was connected to yet in that area. And while we love the Seminole Diversion team, who help children in Seminole county from entering foster care in the first place, we didn’t want them to get back to back care packages, especially when our teams in Orange county had not received any.
Nicole and her fellow advocate Peggy Sunvold took this information, ran the numbers, and agreed: let’s do it! Let’s go a little further outside our neighborhood to care for the Orange County Diversion team. And let’s bring them lunch. And let’s not just feed them one time, but let’s see if a restaurant will donate meal vouchers that we can include in the care packages as well.
As you may have already guessed, this is a team that takes ideas, brainstorms, prays, and moves boldly forward in love toward those involved in child welfare.
This was the point where, as C127, we really stepped out of the picture. We helped with the brainstorming, and we connected the advocates with the supervisors of the Orange County Diversion team. We waited for an update, and then heard how well it went from Nicole and Peggy.
It wasn’t until one of our teammates ran into one of the team’s supervisors, Kaye, that we discovered just how impactful Nicole and Peggy’s efforts were. The team felt encouraged, and Kaye felt energized to ask, “Could we have a church provide or even just sponsor a meal for our monthly team meetings? We pay out of pocket to feed our team.”
It just made sense to go back to Nicole and Peggy to see if they would want to be a part of this before reaching out to other churches.
They were both surprised to hear that Kaye and the other supervisors had to pay with their own money to feed their teams, which is such a simple way to boost team morale for those in an already demanding profession. In a field where there is already a high rate of turnover, supervisors are looking for ways to support the case managers on their teams. We know that, “foster children with one (case manager) achieve permanency, on average, 74.5% of the time and only 17.5% of the time when there is (case manager) turnover.”
Peggy found an incredible solution. She did research and completed the necessary paperwork to request gift cards on behalf of a non-profit from Publix and secured $200 for the supervisors to be able to use to buy meals for their team for the next few months.
In a profession where the stakes are high for retention and the resources are limited, the church has an opportunity to step in with creative solutions. Whether it’s hosting a meal, delivering a meal, or finding local supporters of child welfare professionals, we’d love to brainstorm ways that your church can serve case management teams in Orange, Seminole, and Osceola counties.
Have ever wondered how you can support local case managers who serve the foster families in your community? Do you have an idea that we can help you with? Please email Sarah Land at sland@c127.org.
