Fostering Families Today - From the Family - January 2022

This column focuses on the perspective of parents whose children enter the foster care system. jeremiah Donier is a dad who successfully worked through a plan for reunification. Now, he serves as a mentor to other parents in similar situations and provides the valuable· insight only offered by those with lived experience.

ANEW YEAR FILLED WITH If

FAMILY CONNECTIONS

By jeremiah Donier

our fam ily is li ke mine, t hen the year usually ends and begins with fam ily connections. After refl ecting on past challenges, some families might reso lve t o con nect with a better future. Others might make resolutions to help disadva ntaged families overcom e barriers. My way of building back bett er, overcoming child welfare stigma, and getting past my own trauma was to help oth er parent s co nnect with fam ily-friendly services.

I bega n by guid ing other parent s at an info rm al support group. Then, I published and distributed a fa mily sup port newsletter via my loca l healt h distri ct. With in a yea r, I transit ion ed serving as a parent lead er with the Washington Stat e Parent Ally Comm ittee. Over the next few years, I used my lived experiences to guide family-friendly stat e policies, practices and programs. One of th ose programs, Parent s fo r Parents (P4P), was highlighted in my last co lumn.

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FOSTERING FAMILIES TODAY •

After learning about P4P, Katie Biron, an adoptive and foster parent leader, found a way to build strong relationships between birth and foster families. Biron envisioned the Family Connect ions Program and developed it with Amara, a Washington nonprofit for children and fam ilies experiencing foster care and adoption.

"When my husband and I first became licensed foster parents wit h a goal of adopting a baby, we rea lly didn't understand t he purpose of foster care was reunification and didn't know anything about partnering with birth parents to support kids," said Biron. "We were very siloed in our th inking."

Biron explained her mindset shift didn't happen overnight, it took years and many experiences to develop.

"After I met and got to know a parent .. . my preconceived ideas and biases fell away. I saw a person standing before me who was hurting badly. She was

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

not a bad person, but someone who experienced t rauma and cha llenges I couldn't begin to imagine," Biron said.

'This parent wa nted an open adoption because she wanted her child to know she still cared but made this difficult decision out of love. My life, my beliefs, my everything completely cha nged after I met her. Over the next several yea rs I built a relationship wit h her and began to understand parents involved wit h child welfa re need our support, not our j udgment."

Biron says, t he second time a ch ild came into t heir ca re she wanted t o support and partner with the parent.

The child's social worker provided t he bio uncle's phone number to schedule family visits. The first meeting, held at a coffee shop, started a new relat ionship on neutral ground. Then Biron began including the parent at significant events, like a first haircut, which became t he norm rather t han the exception.

From such shared experiences the relat ionship grew over time as the two

families learned to care for the child together.

"I didn't want all caregivers to go on an eight-year journey to figure out how to support the parents," said Biron, "so I co-created the Family Connections Program to provide intentional support and guidance to parents and caregivers as they built and maintained relationships focused on caring for the child as a team."

In December 2019, King County's Family Treatment Court began hosting a pilot program, matching a birth parent with a parent ally and, a foster caregiver with a caregiver mentor. Each was supported through the process by their respective mentor who also helped them prepare for the first Connection Meeting. That first simple meeting was a positive, supportive chance for parents and caregivers to meet one another.

"It is important for caregivers not to come into the partnership with expectations. You don't expect a child to come into your home healthy and happy, but nobody talks about extending that same expectation to the parent," said Biron. ''You are meeting the parents at the worst point in their life. The first meeting shouldn't set the tone for the whole relationship. The parent might be feeling many different ways, and you are part of a system that took their child. They may be grateful or lash out.

Caregivers need to build a bridge and form a relationship."

The Family Connections Program works with caregivers to understand what parents might experience when children enter foster care. This helps better prepare caregivers to meet parents where they are, to offer grace, and space needed to heal. At the introductory meeting, mentors guide back-and-forth

information shar!ng about each family.

Caregivers provide updates on how the children are doing. Likewise, children's previous routines, likes and dislikes are shared along with family traditions and cultures. This creates an open communication plan and begins relationship building, with ongoing mentor support.

Gortney further explained that although adoption might be a permanent option for some families, the focus remains on the parent and caregiver relationship, which is central to the Family Connections Program.

These relationships often continue following the adoption or reunification.

"I like to tell people to think of the parent-caregiver relationship like a relationship with your in-laws. They might not be people you would pick to be in a relationship with or hang out on day-today but you both love the same person, so you figure out a way to make it work," said Biron. "If I'd had a peer mentor coach me about their experience and walk alongside me, I would have done that so much earlier."

"We do some post-adoption work ... by asking 'who are the adults important to these children,' and fostering a spirit of openness to whatever degree is appropriate and possible," said Gortney. 'This is important because children have a variety of adults who are important to them."

The process of fine-tuning, adjusting for changing circumstances, and incorporating lessons learned, gives the program hope for broader implementation. Since its inception, the Family Connections Program has expanded to two other statewide family treatment courts and several other counties. At the program's core, the focus remains on reducing trauma for the foster care triad - child, parents, caregivers- by decreasing parent and caregiver stress, increasing mutual trust between families and increasing the quantity and frequency of contacts between caregivers and parents.

In 2021, Amara celebrated its 1OOth anniversary. Amara's Chief Innovation Officer jason Gortney explained the group's evolution went through a culture shift since its early days.

"As an organization, we have embraced the value that reunification, when possible, is the primary goal. We support caregivers in embracing that goal too," said Gortney.

Caregiver and parent participants were unavailable for interviews because the program is under development.

However, three insightful storiesYuvia's, Grayson's, and Caitlin and Katie's- are shared on Amara's website. Each demonstrate why it is important to honor and maintain foster and adoptive children's family connections: https://a marafamily.org/programsreso u rces/pa rent -and-foster-familyconnections/. •

jeremiah Donier serves as a family consultant with more than 15 years of lived expertise in behavioral health, child development, domestic violence, protective factors, multi-generational adversities and responsible fathering. As a volunteer and contracted consultant he serves on dozens of projects to keep children safe, help youth thrive, build strong families and create supportive communities. Donier lives on Whidbey Island with his wife and two children and also works part-time as a library associate. In june 2012, Donier was named one the American Bar Association's first Reunification Heroes.

In 2019, he was honored with a Casey Excellence for Children Award.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022 • FOSTERING FAMILIES TODAY •

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