Skookum Kids

The Landing - An emergency shelter for children entering foster care for the first time. We ensure children receive whatever specialized care they might need and buy enough time for social workers to locate the ideal home for each child. Over the last year, we have been honored to care for more than 300 children and involve more than 100 volunteers in our shelters.

Family Time - More than 80% of children in foster care have court-ordered visitation with their family of origin, technically supervised by an agency. Skookum has facilitated these visits since 2016 for just the children in our licensed homes. But contraction in the provider network (mostly from COVID-driven early retirements) has created a need that Skookum has stepped up to address. Today we are the single largest provider of family time in the region and have supervised more than 3,100 hours of parent/child visitation.

Skookum Parents - We train, license, and support volunteer foster families as they care for children who have experienced abuse or neglect. Our primary goal is to cultivate a network of natural support around a child and their family making reunification more likely and recidivism unthinkable. This year, we launched FosterClass, an accelerated, asynchronous foster parent training, nearly all of which was developed in-house, allowing us to emphasize the practices that result in Skookum out-performing the statewide average reunification rate (87% versus 51%). This has improved the quality of our foster parent training/licensing while simultaneously making it faster and more efficient.

Camp Skookum - As an expression of our desire to preserve and deepen the connection between children in foster care and their families, we launched the inaugural camp with 10 families attending, and reviews were rave. The program was developed in partnership with Parents for Parents of Whatcom County, but most of this 3-day weekend was spent celebrating the monumental achievements of these families to get safe, healthy, clean & sober in order to reunite their family under one roof.