Advocate for change
Cultivating Families works to get faith-based communities involved in adoption and foster care system
Denise Hansen is passionate about finding families willing to adopt or foster a child. She has personally fostered four and adopted one — and encourages her friends to open their homes to children in need.
“But there are limits to what I can accomplish,” she said. “I can only touch so many lives. There are still so many children in foster care. The thing I can do is spread the word.”
For the past few years, the Garden Oaks resident hosted an awareness-raising event at her home. Her reasons were twofold. First, she wanted her children to see that other fostered individuals were out there and to hear their stories. Secondly, she wanted new families to consider the option.
While a number of those friends went on to foster and adopt, Hansen wanted to do more. “Eventually, I exhausted my networks of friends,” she said. “I wanted to get the word out on a bigger scale.”
She reached out to St. Andrew’s Episcopal
Church in the Heights, where she attends services. The congregation offered the use of its parking lot for an outreach event last November.
Then, Hansen discovered Cultivating Families, a nonprofit that inspires faith-based communities to care for foster and adopted children.
Founder Rev. Amy Bezecny was doing on a large scale exactly what Hansen wanted to accomplish.
“Amy was the perfect solution,” Hansen said. “I needed an organization to help people come together. I wanted to appeal to much more than the Episcopal Church. I wanted people to know I’m not something special. Anyone can do this.”
Bezecny also adopted a child — after experiencing unexplained infertility for 15 years.
Wanting a child so much had sent Bezecny into a depression. At the time, she was working as an interior designer for hospitals and hospices.
“I found myself always wanting to be at my church, especially to be involved in healing prayer,” she recalled. “In dealing with my depression, I felt God was calling me to do something more, something else.”
Bezecny decided to go into seminary at SMU Perkins School of Theology. She thought she might become a chaplain at the hospitals that she once designed. Instead, her life changed when she adopted her son.
“I saw God so clearly in that,” she said. “There are so many decisions to make, so many hoops to jump through. But you just have to have faith in everything everyone else does.”
Spending time with her son also brought home the need to help other children.
“I started thinking of all the other children who aren’t matched with families,” she said. “I started looking into it more.”
Bezecny did the math and eventually created a new equation.
She discovered that in the Greater Houston area, about 5,500 children are in state care, with 1,500 of those available for adoption.
There are also more than 4,000 faith-based organizations in the same area, Bezecny explained. Of those, about 40 are successfully engaged in adoption and foster care ministry.
“I changed my trajectory,” Bezecny said. “I started an adoption ministry. I didn’t know what that ministry would look like. I just took an open door and walked through it, step by step, really in faith.”
While enrolled in seminary, Bezecny served in children’s ministry at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church. The congregation allowed her to extend her work to include adoption.
“My intent was to teach many congregations how to get involved, to act as an example for ways to adopt and foster so others could do it,” she said.
At first, she thought she could expand to other denominations within the Christian faith.
“Then doors just kept opening wider than I ever imagined,” she said.
Bezecny soon found advocates in Jewish and Muslim congregations. She continued to expand her vision as she moved from St. Luke’s to a four-year fellowship at the Hope and Healing Center and Institute at St. Martin’s Episcopal.
“It was a kind of an incubator, where I could research, plan and develop how to teach many faith communities how to adopt and foster children,” she said.
Spiritual development is important for children and their families, as well as physical safety, health care and education.
“They grow in spirit, as well as physically and mentally, so they can be all they can be,” she said.
After the fellowship, Bezency launched her nonprofit, Cultivating Families, which incorporated in 2016. The organization operates in Missouri City.
Starting after Hurricane Harvey made fundraising difficult, so Cultivating Families focused on building its own infrastructure and developing a solid board that reflects diverse faiths.
Individual donations also started rolling in, Bezecny said, and the nonprofit went to work.
“Anything we can do to equip faith communities to foster children is what we do,” she said. “It seems natural, but it’s not. They don’t know where to start.”
Cultivating Families offers a variety of resources, starting with service projects congregations can do. For example, they make first-night kits and backpacks, with pajamas, stuffed animals and toiletries children need.
The nonprofit also goes to churches, synagogues and mosques to offer awareness events, courses and classes about foster care and adoption.
Bezecny said some members become a foster parent, while others might opt to be an advocate or join a prayer group.
“There’s something everyone can do,” she said. “They can help.”
In addition, she has developed a curriculum for a three-week program to aid parents in deciding if they want to foster or adopt.
“We want people to consider fostering and adopting, but with realistic expectations,” she said.
In addition, the nonprofit offers faith communities ways they can support families who adopt, from starting groups to parenting classes.
“You start with a child,” Bezecny said. “A child can’t live alone in a world. They need a family. A family can’t raise a child alone. They need a faith family. A faith family can’t do it alone either. They need a guide. That’s where we come into the picture.”
Cultivating Families can help, she said. By uniting the faith communities in the effort, she believes, a substantial impact will be made in the amount of children needing homes.
“If different faiths are doing something together, you change that Houstonarea number of children navigating life alone,” she said. “That number of 1,500 waiting will be zero. There are plenty of faith communities to care for them.”
Bezecny hopes that the nonprofit can serve as a model but stressed the importance of the work being local and in person.
That’s something Hansen has seen firsthand — the impact of sharing stories about fostering and adopting. At the event she co-hosted with Bezecny, volunteers of all faiths came together to talk about the needs of children.
“All of us were working under the umbrella of God,” Hansen said. “No matter what you believe, we all have the responsibility of taking care of children.”