Lost Sparrows

The calendar year of 2023 seemingly saw a return to normalcy for Lost Sparrows. It felt like our first full year of stability post-covid, with a stable board of directors, stable staff, and our first return to eastern europe in several years. Change is hard, and the last few years brought more than enough hard, so it has been encouraging to get back to a consistent sense of stability. Our foster / adoptive parent support group had a terrific year in 2023. Our list of families has continued to expand, with over 86 families that have attended. We were able to bring in a host of various speakers to provide trauma parenting education, and continued to build meaningful relationships with other attendees. In may of 2023, our team was able to return to eastern europe for the first time in 4 years. Three of us were able to spend time in sarajevo with our partner organizations, as well as make several new connections. We provided trauma training to over 14 hours of trauma training to over 80 case workers, staff members, social workers, and orphanage staff. We also delivered over 2500 worth of supplies such as weighted blankets, toys, and therapeutic products. We also hosted a dinner for mothers of special needs children. These moms are doing the hard work of raising children with special challenges in an area that encourages parents to place their children into an orphanage. It was an incredible and encouraging night. In september, we hosted our 3rd annual trauma conference. Over 415 people attended over the 2 days, and listened to over 25 speakers share in 30 different sessions. In attendance were 75+ foster parents, 125+ educators and school staff. Foster families received dozens of training hour certificates for their certification requirements, and many social workers were able to receive over a dozen nasw approved cehs. Through donations we were able to offer scholarships to everyone that applied for them, which totaled more than 6000. But most importantly, many relationships formed, and families were encouraged and strengthened, and our community grew. We have also been building our online learning management system, the center for healing childhood trauma. We have created courses using our recorded content from our conferences, with plans to create many more. The website is parentingchildrenwithtrauma.org, and our hope is that it will provide quality education for parents and educators on the impact of childhood trauma.