There are approximately 60,000 children in California who are in foster care. Los Angeles County has the majority at 33,000, but Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside are also seeing increases in their numbers now that children are back at school and interacting with mandated reporters on a day-to-day basis. Riverside County has seen their foster youth numbers double in the last 5 years. HFS is being told by our colleagues at the local county child welfare agencies that they don’t have enough foster parents to help care for children experiencing abuse and neglect, especially newborns to 5 years old. One in five of the children entering foster care in San Bernardino for the first time are under one year of age. At many hospitals in our local area, there are newborns forced to wait in nurseries because of a shortage of foster families able to care for the infants. We need your help to find caring families open to fostering.
HFS provides foster parents with professional training, support, and guidance throughout the entire process from approval, to placement and after placement. Foster parents get to define the amount of children and ages they are open to having placed in their homes and once approved, all foster parents are provided with a tax-free stipend to care for the children in their homes, along with Medi-Cal coverage for all medical, dental, and therapeutic needs the children might have. HFS provides weekly, in-home guidance as well as being an advocate for both the foster parents and the children when working with the dependency system.
As a foster family agency, HFS wants to help fill this very important void, but we need your help. Please consider being a safe harbor for children in need of care and protection. We offer free foster orientations for anyone interested. Please contact us at info@hfs.org or call (213) 202-3900 to get more information about our orientations or visit our website to donate.
