Antony and I were really the most unlikely people to become foster carers, never mind us setting up our own Independent Fostering Agency. We were the typical couple who would say “We love our own kids, but we're not so keen on anybody else's”. When it was announced at our church that we were going to take over the 9-11 year olds' group, our 11 year old daughter announced in astonishment, “But you don't even like children!”

But here we are, 10 years later, having successfully fostered about a dozen very troubled children, now recruiting, training and supporting foster carers ourselves.
We first looked into fostering at the suggestion of our own children.

Whatever our feelings about other people's children, Deborah and Naomi had watched us welcome their frequently dysfunctional friends into our home; comforting them when things went wrong; celebrating with them when things went right; cheering them on the rest of the time, and generally treating them like our own.

Our daughters could see what we couldn't: that with spare bedrooms in the house, and me just having been made redundant, we were an ideal foster family.

Of course, we prayed a great deal about what we should do, seeking God's heart on all matters pertaining to fostering. We could see that God highly values families. When Noah was saved it was with his family; God allowed His Son to be brought up in what was obviously a close knit family, and he has adopted us as Christians into the family of God. We know that He has promised to put the lonely into families and has instructed us to look after widows and orphans.

We quickly realised that fostering was an amazing opportunity to obey God's commands and get paid for it!

Initially we applied both to our Local Authority and to an Independent Fostering Agency. We decided to proceed with our application to the private sector because we felt that their aims and ideals more fully accorded with our own, and because we were advised that private sector carers were generally better supported.

We started fostering with vision and enthusiasm, carrying in our hearts a prophecy given to us that we would touch the lives of many children. We have been thrilled to see the way God has worked in the lives of the children we have looked after, and have never doubted that we were doing exactly what God wanted us to do.

However as time went on we encountered practices within the agency that ranged from carelessness to full-blown child protection issues and by mid-1999 we realised that we could not continue fostering as we were. We had found over a period of time that we were on our own when fighting for our fostered children's rights, and that the high fees being paid by their Local Authorities to the agency were not always spent to their benefit. As carers we were exhausted through lack of proper support, and we particularly suffered the lack of interest shown by our agency when our youngest daughter was involved in a child protection issue against her.

A major concern at the beginning of our training was being told that because fostering is a 7 day a week, 24 hour a day job foster carers will burn out after a certain length of time. When we were first told this we accepted that for some people this may be inevitable, but when we started to experience burn-out ourselves we felt that there was something wrong. What a terrible waste of a valuable resource, if highly trained, experienced foster carers, who want to be able to continue looking after children for many years, are discarded because they are totally worn out. In our experience the wear could easily have been alleviated.

We knew that we had a choice: we could complain about things along with most of our colleagues, ending our fostering career prematurely, or we could look at what was going wrong and do something about it.

Again we prayed, and asked God what we should do. He responded by reminding us of many prophecies and words spoken over us in the past years, including the fact that we would alter the lives of many children - hundreds of children.

He took us back to our original vision: to see the lonely placed in families. But here, as is God's way, He took us a stage further: what is God's idea of a family?

In modern British culture, and indeed to the statutory Social Services, a family is one or two adults caring for one or more children. God's family is far removed from that. In His wonderful exhuberant abundance, God's blueprint for a family includes adults galore: parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, adult friends, grown up cousins, Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all. Everyone takes their place in the life of the many children growing up surrounded by this extensive network of support. No parent should feel they have the sole care of their children we are here to care for each other, and to bear each other's load. Equally no child should be in the situation that they have only their mother or father to interact with. Children need to love and respect elderly people; imitate and admire young adults and sleep in the homes of their peers.

Of course life isn't as simple as that for 'looked-after' children. Any adult who plays a significant part in the life of a child in care must be trained in the special requirements and behaviours they are likely to encounter, and have had the statutory checks carried out, but we could see that this was by no means an insurmountable problem.

For months we worked on a plan that would make God's view of family available to fostered children. We looked at recruiting full and part-time foster carers to recreate the extended family, grouping several main carer families together in a close geographical “cluster” under the overall care of a supervisory carer. With the supervisory carers giving informal support and the formal support coming from the social work team we knew that no one would feel either neglected or overwhelmed.

We have a background in business, so were not shocked at being surrounded by business plans, profit and loss predictions and cash flows. We were very fortunate in being able to continually ask the advice of a social worker with many years' experience in fostering, who was able to be objective and critical every step of the way. It was she who first made the comment that we have heard many times since: “Why hasn't anybody done this before?”

Why indeed? Perhaps because it has been enormously hard work! God has been so gracious, and has unfailingly provided for us every step of the way, but I don't think that we would have reached the stage we are now at without the support of a prayer group set up by our church.

Family Matters Fostering Ltd started trading in February 2000 with one foster family (us), one child in place, a part-time social worker and a part time administrator, both supernaturally provided by God. Our first job was to prepare our new offices for habitation. For an excellent social worker Paul Kirsch made a first rate painter and decorator!

We spoke with some of the families who had approached us during our fostering career, and who told us that they were considering becoming foster carers. After an introductory meeting three couples attended a Choosing to Foster Course that we ran, had Form Fs prepared, and within a few months were ready to care for children themselves. We were also approached by an experienced foster family from Ramsgate who liked what we were doing, and wanted to transfer from their existing agency to us. We had many applications from part-time (supplementary) carers, ranging from young married couples to the grandparents of one of our main carers. These were trained and made familiar with all our procedures, fully checked, then introduced to the children in place.

By June we were piloting our idea, and it worked very well.

All our carers are paid extremely well, reflecting the responsibility and importance of the job they do. Main carers have one evening a week off, when Family Matters supplies and pays a supplementary carer to look after their children for them. We run activities one day each week of the school holidays, have regular get togethers and excellent training meetings.

One of the most essential, though neglected, aspects of foster care is accurate record keeping. This was discussed in Marian Lovatt's article “Safe, Sound, Secure” in the Summer 2000 edition of Caring Magazine.We have set up a reporting system that provides a full history of the child's placement, accurate signed records to refer to if any allegation is ever made, and a daily record of the child's and foster family's physical and emotional well being. We give each main carer family a fax machine, and each day they fill in the Daily Record Sheet, then fax it to their supervisory carer and Head Office the following morning. These are signed and dated to comply with the NFCA's recommendations, and are checked carefully to monitor progress within that family. If there are any potential areas for concern the supervisory carer or social worker can look into it straight away.

Similar record sheets are filled in by the supplementary carers each time they look after the children, and are faxed by the main carers, so we always have up to the minute knowledge about each child. Each week a summary of these reports is faxed to the child's social worker, keeping them up to date with the placement.

We have a fail-safe way of making sure Head Office receives these reports: the pay is worked out by counting through them: no report no pay!

We have been astonished at the reception to Family Matters by Social Services. We receive many referrals from Kent, as well as London Boroughs, and other Local Authorities. We have grown enormously, and have many different types of child placed with our families. We are particularly pleased to have some refugees, and we employ a part-time fully qualified EFL teacher, so each refugee placed with us has a minimum of 8 hours a week tuition in English as a foreign language, and an introduction to the British way of life.

As you can see we are firmly committed to God's perfect will for the children, and we recognise that we have a responsibility to meet the diverse needs of today's multi-cultural society. We recruit carers from all walks of life, ethnic groups, faiths, and no faith at all. By having a wide variety of supplementary carers we can more easily ensure that a child's specific needs are met.

Family Matters is a non-profit making organisation, and any surplus funds are transferred to a charity to be used for the benefit of the children at the end of each financial year. This may be funding a college placement, paying the deposit on a flat, paying for equipment for a special interest, or sending the carers away on a well deserved break when they are getting jaded. We just feel that all the money should be used to enhance the lives of the children.

It is clear from statements currently being made by politicians that the trend is towards the private sector providing care for children in need. Churches and charities have been identified as key groups in this area, and we are excited to find ourselves pioneering a new style of Child Care Provision.

We would never have guessed that we would be doing this, but God has got a great sense of humour. And doesn't He always pick the most unlikely candidates to do His particular work?

 

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