FaithBridge Foster Care

Foster Child and Foster Family Support: FaithBridge provides placement support and trauma-informed case management services for foster children who are placed in FaithBridge foster family homes. FaithBridge foster children range from birth to 21 years of age and all have entered foster care due to abuse and/or neglect. In 2023, FaithBridge served a total of 336 children. We saw 83 children reunified with their birth families and when returning home was not possible, 28 children were adopted by their FaithBridge foster family.

Adoption and Child Life History: Each year, approximately 1,600 children in Georgia's foster care system need families who will adopt them. FaithBridge works to find adoptive homes for these children - specifically teens, sibling groups of three or more, and children with special needs. FaithBridge also works with the State of Georgia to provide Child Life Histories (compilations of official documents such as birth certificates and medical histories, and historical information like birth family details and school records) for children who are eligible for adoption, ensuring that they have all of their required documents to be adopted. In 2023, in the adoption program's early stages, FaithBridge matched two families with children waiting in the foster care system to be adopted, resulting in four children finding their forever homes. Additionally, FaithBridge completed 687 Child Life Histories, making adoption possible for each child.

Foster Home Recruitment and Development: FaithBridge recruits, trains, and supports foster and adoptive families in local churches. We license them to provide community-based, short-and long-term traditional, medically fragile, and therapeutic care as well as adoptive homes for foster children in Georgia. In 2023 FaithBridge launched four new church partners. Through these partners, FaithBridge recruited, trained, and licensed 51 new foster, adoptive, and respite families and supported more than 250 foster homes.

Support for Young Adults Aging Out of Care: FaithBridge Youth Opportunities assists young adults in Georgia, between the ages of 18 and 26, who have aged out of foster care on their journey into adulthood. Young adults are provided with financial assistance (to support room and board, transportation, tuition, education supplies, healthcare, and other living assistance), life coaching, and enrollment support into post-secondary institutions. After launching in August 2023, FaithBridge Youth Opportunities assisted more than 69 young adults with financial assistance, life coaching, and enrollment support to achieve acceptance into 34 post-secondary institutions throughout Georgia.

FaithBridgeU Online Learning: In order to care for children successfully, we must excel at supporting and retaining quality foster families. FaithBridgeU was built from a vision in which every foster parent has access to high-quality, Christ-centered, professionally informed training, built through collaboration. Courses are designed to engage learners, offer practical tools for parenting, and connect with families through stories, interviews, and testimonies. In 2023, FaithBridgeU was launched to the public and provided training to more than 500 foster and adoptive parents in addition to the FaithBridge community.