Foster Care Book: Chapter 8

Chapter 8 - How We Got into Foster Care

The way Marilyn and I got into foster care may very well be unique. Marilyn came home from work, at a retirement home, one day with a flier that asked, "Do you have room, can set another place at the table and have love for children? If so, you can make a difference in the life of an ’at risk’ child." This flier was from an organization called Volunteer Emergency Families for Children (VEFC).

VFC is active throughout the state of Virginia. The organization is made up of families who volunteer (with no compensation). They take ’at risk’ children into their homes for a period of one to twenty-one days. The children range in age from newborn to seventeen. All children are placed by an agency (Social Services or accredited agency). The children are screened by these agencies (as best they can on an emergency basis) to be sure that they are VEFC appropriate That means they will likely not hurt the family or themselves and they are not on drugs or alcohol. Virginia believes that they have been the only state in the union with such a unique organization (just recently it has boiled over into North Carolina).

The flier that my wife received was from that organization. I had recently retired and Marilyn was due to retire within the next two years so we decided, on the spot, that we would volunteer in the VEFC organization. We also decided that we would take in teenagers. Our peers told us we were ’nuts’ to take in teenagers. That was seven years and fifty placements earlier. Forty-seven of those placements were when we were with the VEFC organization and we took them in on a completely voluntary basis. VEFC is a terrific concept in an emergency and the organization is well structured and effective. Members of our Social Services organization kept telling us we should become long term foster parents because they were concerned about the amount of our own money we were putting into the effort. Being on a retirement income, they felt we could not continue to afford to take care of the children without some sort of compensation.

Recently, Marilyn and I have become ’long term’ foster parents and receive $400 per month, per child from Social Services -- Not much to offset eating habits of our fifty first placement. He is a fifteen year old boy who, we figure, eats $100 per week of junk food alone, plus everything else he can get his hands (or mouth) on. Most teenage males are heavy eaters but this kid goes way, way beyond big eater. He eats if there is nothing else to do (including getting up in the middle of the night for a ’snack’). The boy’s ’snacks’ are twice the size of my full meals.

We have looked into becoming foster parents with an independent placing agency. These agencies pay foster parents a great deal more per month (sometimes as much as three times what Social Services pays). This is done on the assumption that at least one of the parents will not be working and will spend full time taking care of the children. Since we needed something to supplement our retirement income and we are so deeply into foster care, that appeared to be a win/win situation.

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