Group hopes to help foster families in larger facility
FORT SMITH — The Sebastian and Crawford counties branch for a local nonprofit helping foster children and families is working to help more people by moving to a bigger office.
The CALL — originally an acronym for “Children of Arkansas Loved for a Lifetime” and now a reference to a call to serve — provides support and education for foster families in Arkansas. The nonprofit, Christian organization recruits families through churches, according to County Coordinator Emily Treadaway.
“The CALL is a faith-based organization,” Treadaway said. “We really believe that as a foster family you need support, and so we recruit through the churches because we hope that if you’re involved in the church you’re gonna have built-in support.”
Treadaway said The CALL will only recruit and train families who are members of a church and will refer any families that do not fit their criteria to other groups, such as Foster Love, or directly to the Department of Human Services. The CALL also will not recruit or train LGBTQIA+ families or unmarried heterosexual couples living together. They will, however, train single or divorced individuals.
Despite not recruiting or training certain demographics of families, Treadaway said that once a family of any shape or size is approved and placed with a child, The CALL will provide the same support and resources to them as to the families they recruit and train.
The CALL is a statewide organization operating with an executive board in Little Rock and a local advisory board in Fort Smith serving both Sebastian and Crawford counties. The advisory board provides feedback and suggestions to The CALL staff, and each come from a different background with different life experiences to help the nonprofit stick to its mission and values, according to Treadaway.
Until the move, the Sebastian and Crawford counties branch was operating out of a 1,200-square-foot building. Now they are in a 4,000-square-foot facility. The new building includes a large empty area Treadaway said they plan to convert to a multiple-room visiting area for biological families and their children in foster care. She said these visits were the primary motivation behind the move.
“Families whose children are in foster care can come
here and visit because they’re required to have a four-hour visit once a week,” Treadaway said. “So at our old office we were able to provide that, but it kind of took over and exploded, and we didn’t realize how much the need was for visitation, and so we’re doing like 600 visits a year in two small bedrooms.”
Treadaway said the nonprofit, which does not receive any state or federal funding, got the money to purchase the new building through donations from their major benefactors: ArcBest, the Whitaker Family Foundation and a family whom The CALL had recruited, trained and supported in the foster process.
The CALL serves the roughly 480 children in foster care in the two counties alone. They do this by training families and churches on how to care for these children and recruiting more families to foster. Treadaway said they also provide any support foster families need and help applicants with paperwork and references required by the Department of Human Services.
As they are not a private placement agency, they do not approve families or place the children; the Department of Human Services does those tasks and The CALL works closely with the agency.
“We have monthly meetings with them about the families they bring to us,” said Latoya Maxwell-Harris, family service worker supervisor for the Department of Human Services Division of Children and Family Services in the Fort Smith office. “We discuss barriers with the families, target and recruitment efforts we need and better ways to support the families in general.”
The organization, beyond supporting the foster families, also aims to train the churches they partner with, such as First Presbyterian Church, Treadaway said.
“Our mission is really to educate and equip the churches because we only have four part-time employees,” she said. “There’s no way we can care for all the kids and help the families that need help, but if we can get our local churches equipped so that they can know how to help, then they can handle it and we can really make a difference.”
REALITIES OF FOSTER CARE
Foster care can be a daunting journey. One advisory board member, Kristan Williams, recently closed her home after more than five years and 40 kids.
“We closed our home in February of 2023 after fostering for five-and-a-half years,” Williams said.
She and her husband spent those five years with 40 foster children alongside their four biological children and one adopted son.
“He was actually our first placement,” Williams said. “We opened our home in 2017, and he was born the day we opened, and we got to take him home straight from (the neonatal intensive care unit).” After fostering him for 18 months, his biological parents’ rights were terminated, and the Williams adopted him.
Now the Williams family still helps the foster community by serving on the advisory board. Williams said she is unsure if her family will reopen their home, but for the time being they simply needed a break.
“It’s a grieving process — you bring someone into your home like that and you love them like your own child and your kids love them as their siblings, and we just needed a little break,” Williams said.
Treadaway also discussed the hardships of fostering and the unhappy reality of the system. She said there are too many children in need and The CALL does not have the resources for them all — including just having a bed — and described the system as “broken.”
Treadaway compared the system to putting the department of motor vehicles in charge of children.
“We all know how frustrating the DMV is and how the government operates, and now they’re trying to care for children, and it’s really hard — even if you have the perfect system it would still be very hard,” she said.
To combat the abundance of children in need, Treadaway said The CALL is working on preventative measures to keep children out of the system. They do this by helping biological families of children entering the foster system to get the help and resources they need so the children can stay with their relatives and not be placed with a foster family.
Treadaway said the counties also need more mental health resources for the children, as a large focus of their programs is helping children heal from their trauma.
“Mental health services are definitely lacking in Sebastian County — we need more,” Treadaway said. “Sadly we need more for kids under the age of 3, which is really sad to think that a toddler, a baby, would need therapy.”
However, despite the hardships, Williams and Treadaway urged any who have considered fostering to help however they can.
“You’re always going to have an excuse not to step up and do it, but the fact is there are hundreds of children that need a home,” Williams said. “You don’t have to have a huge house or a bunch of money. With The CALL and having that support it makes it so much easier and you always have someone in your corner to help.”