Grantee Stories
Kids at Heart - A faith based community initiative in Colorado.
A different approach to volunteers
Kids at Heart is a program started in 2002 by Heart of the Rockies Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). They provide support to adoptive and foster families without regard to their religious preference. Kids at Heart formed when the church realized there were unmet needs in the adoption and foster community and decided to take action. Heart of the Rockies doubled the outreach capability of the Kids at Heart program by partnering with a local Lutheran church in October, 2003. Currently new partners have been and are being recruited.
A few key points about Kids at Heart:
Kids at Heart is different from many community programs for adoptive and foster families in several ways. First, most of the volunteers who support Kids at Heart are not already a part of the foster or adoption community when they become involved. Every time a volunteer is recruited and trained, new community members are introduced to the issues of adoption and foster care, thus building a constituency of people who understand and care about these problems. Each volunteer gets to know families first hand, and consequently cares more about the problem because people care much more about people than about statistics.
Kids at Heart seeks new resources of people, energy, and donations from outside the foster and adoption community rather than asking that resources be diverted from some other program serving this need. Faith groups and faith people have motivation to help, charitable giving budgets, and ready sources of volunteers. Finally, being recognized as heroes by faith groups encourages parents.
In its second year of operation, Kids at Heart teamed up with two parent groups and lobbied the county commission for $100,000 in additional funding for child protection services. The funding came from “roads and bridges” and reflected the idea that suffering children are a higher priority than fixing potholes. One key reason we were successful was that county officials understood that Kids at Heart volunteers had no financial interest in better services, but simply wanted government to do better by our children.
Contact person: Bill Stout, phone number: 970-223-6976