Georgia Organization Launches New Website to Help Local Children

ALPHARETTA – With almost 11,000 Georgia kids in foster care, the state’s largest faith-based child placing agency has launched a new website to show potential foster families the number of kids in their neighborhoods who are in need of foster parents and families who will give them a loving home. The need can be shown within a fifteen-minute drive of any location in Georgia and provides the information segmented by age group.

Georgia-based FaithBridge Foster care has launched the site www.SeedtheNeed.org to ensure that there are enough foster homes for Georgia’s foster children in their local communities. Currently, about 66 percent of foster children are placed in care outside their home county due to a lack of foster families.

“We see this website as a way for potential foster families to get to know just how many of these children who need love and support are in their own back yards,” said Bob Bruder-Mattson, President and CEO of FaithBridge. “We know so many people out there have the love of Christ in their hearts and would love to share their homes with these children, but they just need a way to see how many kids need their help right near where they live.”

“Too often teens are placed in hotels with government workers monitoring them when state officials cannot find foster parents to care for them. Children of all ages are frequently placed outside of their home counties, some as far as an eight-hour drive from their home. This removes these children from everything familiar to them and reduces their chances of reunification with their families,” Bruder-Mattson said.

The website SeedtheNeed.org, for example, shows that within a 15-minute drive of Marietta Square, 207 children have been removed from their homes and placed into foster care and 47% of those children were moved outside of their county. It also shows that there are 84 homes
needed for foster children up to five-years-old; 48 homes needed for ages 6 to 12; and 64 homes for teens. The website also shows in which counties they have been placed.

Children wind up in the state foster care system for a variety of reasons but usually parents lose rights to their children due to abuse or neglect. FaithBridge has traditionally worked with churches to reach out to potential foster parents to help care for these children and mend
family relationships.

“We believe this SeetheNeed.org will make it easier for Americans to see we have a tremendous foster care challenge in our nation, but that people can make a difference in their own communities. It is intended to motivate couples, families and even churches to take steps necessary to bring foster kids into their homes and give them the nurturing they need,” Bruder-Mattson said.

There is a plan for the SeetheNeed.org website to give families across the nation the ability to discover the number of foster parents needed in any particular city, county or zip code.

FaithBridge Foster Care is a certified Best Christian Workplace for four consecutive years. It has served 2,000 individual children in the past 15 years, representing more than 700,000 nights children have spent in safe homes.

About FaithBridge Foster Care - FaithBridge Foster
Care is the largest Georgia-based and Christ-centered child placing agency in the state. They recruit, train, and support foster and adoptive families in local churches and license them to provide community-based, short- and long-term traditional and therapeutic care and adoptive homes for foster children in Georgia. They are licensed with the state of Georgia to provide Child Life Histories for children who will not be reunifying with their birth families, ensuring they have
all of their required documents to be adopted.

FaithBridge Foster Care’s vision is for every foster child to experience the hope, healing, and unconditional love of Jesus Christ and their mission is to mobilize, organize, and equip local churches to solve their community’s foster care crisis.

They developed “SeetheNeed.org,” a website intended to help create more homes for foster children. It calculates the number of foster families needed in any specific area within Georgia and they plan to add more states in the future. They pioneered the Community of Care® model which is designed to surround every foster family with a network of trained volunteers and professionals providing the support they need to provide safe and stable homes for foster children. Since 2007, FaithBridge has served more than 2,000 children in foster care through partnering with 97 churches.

For more information, please visit www.faithbridgefostercare.org.