Foster care advocates celebrate collaborative

As deputy director of child welfare for the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, Deborah Shropshire has a vision of the future for some families who find themselves on the edge of a crisis.

“I have a dream that a family would never enter child welfare custody in Oklahoma County simply because they don’t have community around them,” Shropshire said.

“There may be other things that may cause the need for intervention, but it shouldn’t be that you don’t have relatives, you don’t have friends, you don’t have community members who could have helped you during your time of crisis and prevented your children from being in a bad spot.”

Shropshire shared her vision at a recent Count Me In 4 Kids gathering in Oklahoma City. Members and supporters of the Count Me In 4 Kidsmet for lunch to celebrate the collaborative’s sixth anniversary.

The DHS leader’s remarks came as she discussed Safe Families Oklahoma, a faith-based program that was started several years ago by Count Me In 4 Kids in partnership with Crossings Community Church and Council Road Baptist Church in Bethany. Safe Families has been described as a faith response to the state’s need for caring families to help Oklahoma families in crisis. The program is essentially a network of volunteer host families who provide a “safety net” for parents who are perhaps one crisis away from having the state place their children into foster care.

Shropshire said Safe Families has helped a variety of different families such as a mother who needed someone to care for her children as she participated in ReMerge, which gives real-life second chance opportunities to women facing incarceration. She said Safe Families also came to the rescue of a grandmother who needed to have surgery but had no friends or family members to care for the grandson she was raising while she took care of her health.

Shropshire told those gathered that the work of Safe Families is just

beginning now that the program has offered more than 1,300 “safe nights” for children whose families are struggling with crisis.

She said the program is seeing more churches and volunteer families step up to become involved, but they are still trying to get the word out to the community that more churches and volunteers are needed to turn her dream for the community into reality.