On the heels of National Foster Care Month, we sat down with Gaile Osborne, executive director of Foster Family Alliance of North Carolina, to learn more about her personal story with foster care as well as the work of the Alliance.
What brought you to Foster Family Alliance of North Carolina?
My husband and I started almost 15 years ago with the idea that we wanted children and unfortunately due to some medical reasons, we ended up looking at different routes. When we approached the foster care system, we had very misconceived ideas of what foster care was really about, because we went into it thinking that this was an option to adopt. And little did I know how wrong our thought process was, but more so, I had no idea that I was stepping into an arena that would absolutely be my passion and would end up being a career.
Tell us a little bit about the mission and the work of Foster Family Alliance of North Carolina.
Foster Family Alliance (FFA) is the support parent association for foster, kinship, and adopted families in North Carolina. FFA started back in 1975 with a group of moms that sat around a table, and were frustrated with trying to get information, understand legalities and figure out how to walk through this journey of being a foster parent. FFA ended up becoming a place where families can come and learn and train, and get that emotional support that they need. We realized very early on that it wasn’t just about the families, it was about the youth that we were in care of, so we expanded our mission to include how to be a better foster care system in North Carolina, how to better serve our kinship families and how to have wrap-around supports for our families who have adopted from foster care.
What does the organization do around the recruitment and retention of foster parents?
Recruitment and retention are the foundation of our mission. Retention is one area that I’m incredibly passionate about, because retention of foster parents is absolutely the number one recruitment tool. Word of mouth for my current families to other families. If our narrative is, “I’m not getting the support I need,” or, “I can’t do this and work full time,” then that family is actually going to push people away, so we want to really support a positive narrative of our current families. When we have foster parents that are upset, we want to meet them and we want to walk through it with them.
Can you tell us about the results of the survey you conducted and what you discovered as to why foster families are leaving?
Back in December 2018, there were 7,146 foster families in North Carolina. As of the end of March 2024, we were down to 5,700 families. And that’s an incredible loss considering there are more than 11,000 children in custody. We had an event recently and brought families together. I stood there for about 10 minutes and watched these families walk in. And they weren’t walking in with one kid, they were walking in with two, three, four, five. There was one family there that had six foster kids. Those that are doing the lift are doing it at an incredible rate because of how much loss we’ve had in foster parents. But we’ve got to be turning this around or we’re going to be in an incredible crisis.
The survey showed the top three reasons families are leaving. (One is) because of inconsistent policies and expectations from different counties. Second are child behavioral issues and last is foster parent grieving, so we’re actually hiring therapists to do grief-related when these children leaving the home. Because I say this all the time, as a foster parent, you don’t go in this to love with your pinky toe in the water. You go in full body, jump or plunge. And so when you come out, whether you step out or a kid leaves your home, you leave your heart just wide open to be hurt.
I picked up a foster parent for lunch today earlier, and she just gets in the car and she just cries. She’s like, “My heart is broken. It physically hurts.” Yep, you’ve had that kid over two years that you got her straight from the NICU. You have done everything you can to give her a great start to life, and now it’s time for mom to step in. And she knows it, but in the end it hurts. But she did say to me, “This is foster care and this is what we sign up for. And yes, I have to be okay with this.” It’s hard. But what does that mama feel? What does that daddy feel when that child is taken out of their home or taken from them at birth, or whatever the scenario may be? That level of grief has to be far more than the grief I’m feeling. I mean, that’s their own flesh and blood. I had never really stepped back and embraced that thought. And when you start to walk in those shoes just emotionally trying to figure all this out, I mean, I can’t even imagine. No wonder they’re upset and angry. No wonder they’re unable to engage from the beginning because their heart’s broken. They’re feeling the same things we’re feeling times 10.
You discussed reductions in foster care, but could you talk about the reasons that people are staying?
The number one reason that a parent stays in is that relationship with that child. 25 percent of our foster families said, “The relationship with the child is the reason I’m in. That’s the best thing that’s ever happened.” I firmly believe that those that answer to become a foster parent, their heart is in a space of servants. The other reason they stay in is (it’s) just emotionally rewarding. The experiences of gratitude, joy, love, connection.
As we look at improvements to the system, the number one thing I truly thought that foster parents were going to say (in the survey) is we need more money. We need more financial support, we need more options around SNAP benefits, around WIC, things like that. And it wasn’t. The number one thing was communication. We want to know what we can know about a child’s case. We want the communication to be consistent and concise through the social workers, through our licensed workers, with the biological family or the family of origination. The second thing that came up was training. They wanted the peer-to-peer support over the professional support because there’s something to be had when I answer a phone call and it’s a foster family on the other line that are upset or crying or angry or whatever, and I’m able to say to them, “Okay, I’ve been right where you are. Let me help you through this moment,” versus someone citing policy or saying “I can’t talk to you,” or “I don’t have time right now.”
What are two to three ways that policymakers, the community, and other stakeholders can support foster parents?
There are so many things that you can do like send a card, all the way to buying a car for a youth that is aging out of the system and needs it to go to work. The other way is from a legislative standpoint, continuing to monitor the payment to our foster families. At the end of the day, I can promise you, we are not making money off of the stipends that come to us. I joke and say, “By the first week of the month after the check comes in or the direct deposit, now they’re on my dime.” Because it’s a lot.
Just signing up for soccer or just driving to the appointments, you don’t think about that stuff. So continuing to look at that as a priority. And lastly, asking how can we work together to better the system? How can the state pull in stakeholders to the table? How can we collaborate to make the system better? And I do think even in just the last three years we have moved more towards that versus everything being siloed. We are seeing change happen by that collaboration, and so to continue that and make it a priority in what we’re doing.
What has it meant to you personally to foster children?
For me personally, my love language is service. It’s one of those things that, A, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. But B, it’s a cup filler. It is something that we work really hard at as a family, even our adopted children. We’ve got one child in guardianship. As a unit, this is what we do as a family. We love on children for however long we can. And so for me personally, I actually am coming up on maxing out my house, meaning that I probably can’t take another placement unless it’s a sibling of a child that I already have. I’m beginning to grieve that, because for so long this has been our identity. It hurts because you know that need is there and you want to be part of the solution, but at the same time you want to be everything that the children need that are already in your home.
