Good news from HCKids!

SUPPORTING FAMILIES AND CHANGING LIVES

May 2020

Celebrating and honoring foster caregivers

We are always grateful for all the wonderful foster families that help us take care of kids in Hamilton County.

But May, National Foster Care Month, is a good time for us to make sure all the foster parents and extended families that help us every day know that we appreciate them tremendously.

We also thank all the agencies, churches and other groups that provide such great support to our foster families. We could not do this without you!

Help us spread the message: Call 241-KIDS

With kids out of school and spending more time with stressed parents, we have been concerned about under-reporting abuse and neglect.

We are working with Cincinnati Public Schools and Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center on messaging that encourages parents to take a breath, take kids outside and ask for help when they feel things becoming overwhelming.

To anyone who knows a child they think might be experiencing abuse or neglect, please call our hotline, 241-KIDS. Take a look back at our Do Ask, Do Tell campaign.

Please help us spread the word on this important topic by sharing our posts on social media.

Meet Angel

Angel earns good grades in school. Her favorite class is science because she likes doing hands-on activities.

She likes sports, watching the Reds play on TV, playing outside and being at the pool. She also likes to play Monopoly.

She likes pop and country music, with Thomas Rhett being her favorite artist.

Angel is funny, happy, kind and always helpful. Her caseworker says she smiles all the time.

She doesn’t mind doing chores like keeping her room clean and doing the dishes. She would like to be a police officer or a baker when she grows up.

Know a teen in foster care who's graduating?

Our annual Celebration of Dreams event in June for teens in foster care who graduate from high school had to be postponed, but we are still planning to honor all the grads.

If you know a teen who's achieving this milestone this year, please let us know so we can make sure to recognize them. Thank you.

Thank you from our leadership

This pandemic has been quite an unusual situation for our agency and our employees. But we have risen to the occasion. And we've done it in large part because of the strong support we receive from this community:

United Way of Greater Cincinnati provided $100,000 in gift cards for us to distribute to people struggling financially because of COVID-19;

The Hamilton County Auditor’s office assisted us in the distribution of nearly 6,000 $500 checks to eligible families through our emergency PRC Program. These were some of the first emergency relief dollars distributed to hurting families in our community.

Cincinnati Public Schools and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center are helping produce flyers with important messages about parenting, mental health and child abuse prevention;

The Ohio Practitioners Network for Fathers and Families partnered with the Hamilton County Fatherhood Collaborative to help dads deal with homeschooling and other issues, and held a Zoom hangout where 100 dads found support;

We expressed a need for - and then promptly received - community donations, including:
Hand sanitizer from Northern Row Brewery, for our social workers who continue to go into the field;
Face coverings from local seamstresses (including Delhi Township Trustee Rose Stertz);
iPads and laptops for children in foster care to finish school work on.

Thank you to everyone who helped bring about these collaborative efforts. As I’ve been telling our employees – we continue to be a rock for this community and what you are doing, every day, makes a difference people recognize. We have been Supporting Families and Changing Lives for 75 years.

But not without a lot of support from you. Thank you.

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