Forestdale’s Strong Families : Foster Care program provides nurturing homes to help more than 500 youth achieve their personal, academic and professional goals.

Like all kids, children in foster care need guidance, patience, love and a strong education. If you chose to become a foster parent, your role is to parent children who face adversity, helping them heal and thrive.  Forestdale supports foster and birth parents so they and their children, birth to 21 years, are successful. We provide training and counseling so the children, birth parents, and foster parent can thrive.

We work to strengthen and reunite families rapidly and efficiently whenever possible, and if not possible, find adoptive homes for children. In Fiscal year 2018, we worked with 580 foster children, ages 0-21. We are pleased that 51 youth found permanent homes through adoption.

In 2017, we began our Home Away From Home (HAFH) program, funded by ACS, to expand the number of new, quality foster homes and increase support to existing ones. We piloted the Mockingbird Family Model (MFM), developed by the Mockingbird Society. MFM builds intentional communities (hubs) of foster parents around an experienced foster parent, known as the Hub home provider, who is available to support 6-10 other foster families with everything from navigating institutional systems, to providing respite services, hosting monthly social gatherings, and transporting children for appointments. On October 22, 2018, Deputy Mayor Herminia Palacio and NYC ACS First Deputy Commissioner Eric Brettschneider came to Forestdale to celebrate the wonderful volunteers who have stepped forward to help children when they are most vulnerable.  They heard from a panel of Forestdale HAFH foster parents about their work with the MFM; a model that to help each other with advice, friendship, transportation, and more.  Currently, the two hubs we started, with 15 foster families caring for 40 foster youth, have been very productive and particularly helpful to teens in care. Forestdale’s pilot has been so successful that now NYC Administrative Services (ACS) is expanding the use of the Mockingbird Family Model with additional foster care agencies.

Forestdale has a strong track record of success in helping families succeed:  we have pioneered a parental attachment model for system-involved families that has become a citywide foster care standard (i.e. the University of Delaware’s evidence-based Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up model); we partnered with New York University’s Child Study Center to pilot the evidence-informed model of Trauma Systems Therapy to help families heal; and we have received good reviews for our work, including a Safety score from the City of 94 (on a scale of 100),

Parenting is not easy. In fact, you’ve never done anything so challenging. But the rewards are immense. You’re volunteering to save a life, and hopefully help a family reunify. And Forestdale will be with you every step of the way.

Foster Parent Trainings

Good News! Foster Parent Online Trainings are back. Use the link below to setup and access the trainings.

 http://www.hslcnys.org/fosterparenttraining/

For more information on this program email: fosterparentrecruitment@forestdaleinc.org