Blog

As we kicked off 2017, the village continued to grow at a rapid pace in both needs and support. We were receiving requests from foster and kinship families throughout the greater Austin area and spending most of our weekends taking truckloads of Welcome Packs and essentials to the families reaching out from North Austin and Round Rock. Founding board member Carrie, a foster and adoptive parent herself, got her church in Round Rock engaged to come up with a home base on that end of town. We started with one storage unit. One became two. Two became three.

It quickly became a well-oiled machine satellite location, with a growing team of volunteers to keep it running. But we knew it wasn't a sustainable long-term setup. There were real limitations besides the challenge of working in storage spaces without heat, AC, or electricity (I have vivid memories of using our car headlights to see while packing Welcome Packs after dark). More importantly, there was no welcoming space for a nervous family, no room for a child to pick out the stuffed animal that might become their comfort in a new home. So we intentionally packed and delivered every Welcome Pack to each family's doorstep, while dreaming of a space that would someday be worthy of us inviting them into.

Simultaneously, I was learning the ins and outs of grant writing and program development. The foundational structure of what Foster Village was created to do had always been clear: equipping families with essentials, connecting them with support, and advocating for community engagement. Those three pillars guided everything. Each new idea was rooted in the gaps and struggles we experienced firsthand as foster parents, coupled with my lived experience of the critical role community played during my own traumatic childhood. And every new idea went to Lacy, our daughter's birth mom, for a final stamp of approval, as her perspective as a former foster youth was essential in ensuring the children remained at the center of everything we built.

The entry point for every family we walked alongside was a Welcome Pack. Getting essentials into their hands at exactly the right moment created an instant connection and a tangible reminder that they weren't alone. And when a grant opportunity opened the door for something more, Project SOOTHe was born. I had dreamed about getting sensory tools into the hands of every family we served since that had been such a game-changer in our own home. My child development background gave me language for why, but it was, again, the lived experience of parenting children with sensory challenges that made me feel the full weight of it. The name Project SOOTHe came out of a brainstorming text with a small tribe of foster mom friends spread throughout the U.S., and the acronym practically named itself: Sensory Objects Offering Therapeutic Help. A fellow adoptive mama used her graphic design expertise to create the Project SOOTHe logo, and an amazing seamstress from church hand-sewed every custom weighted blanket that was requested using the fabric each child picked out for themself.

Around the same time, our Support Gatherings started to organically come together — a space created just for caregivers to sit across from someone walking a similar journey and hear those three words: I get it. We had hosted family events before, but this was different. Creating something specifically for the caregivers became the heartbeat of our sustaining support. It also led to kicking off our Parent Night Out events hosted at a local church. Volunteers lined up to help give weary caregivers a night off.

By August 2017, we were in a rhythm with our programs while sitting in the tension of hopes and dreams for a more sustainable physical space. And then, a literal and figurative hurricane changed everything.

When Harvey hit the Texas coast on August 25th, we watched the news unfold like so many others, feeling utterly helpless. I reached out to child welfare contacts we had in Houston to see if there was anything that would be helpful from Austin. DFPS shared a list of essential items needed for children in foster care in the hardest-hit areas who had been displaced by the storm. I made an Amazon Wish List with a simple social media graphic, with the plan of collecting and delivering these items to the DFPS offices. The only address we had to ship things to at the time was my home.

Within hours of posting, I noticed dozens of items being purchased off the list. By the next day, there were hundreds. Toiletries, socks, diapers, car seats filling virtual carts. Panic started to set in when I realized what was happening… the post was going viral, shared thousands of times.

I remember sitting in the sea of packages that started arriving by the literal truckload feeling completely overwhelmed. We were being contacted by USPS and UPS who were also overwhelmed by the logistics of delivering thousands of packages to a residence. For several consecutive days, truckloads of packages were delivered to our driveway.

Our neighbors and friends rallied together to help us haul everything to our storage units, where we then needed to figure out how to quickly sort and organize everything to get it where it was most needed. During a particular moment of overwhelm, I felt a nudge to pause and look through the gift receipt pile from the thousands of delivered packages and started reading the messages. From every state throughout the U.S. From Canada. From Melbourne, Australia. From Qatar. Strangers from around the world, showing up for children they would never meet. And our own small army of people locally coming together to help us organize and distribute the mountain of generosity.

While Harvey was devastating in so many ways, it also flooded us with proof that people truly care about those in need of a village.

And here in Austin, it made something else undeniably clear. Foster Village needed a permanent home. A real place that could hold the weight of what this was becoming. A place where everyone could feel the heart behind the mission.

We had outgrown the storage units. We had outgrown our own expectations. And we had just barely begun.