Our mission: to provide a safe, loving, nurturing home for foster children.
Safe: protected from or not exposed to danger or risk. Uninjured, with no harm done. (Webster’s)
To keep a child safe, most adults are armed with enough common sense to make this easy. Not everyone, but most. Don’t leave the baby in the bathtub. Don’t let kids cross busy roads. Cut up food into small bites to avoid choking. Don’t do drugs, talk to strangers, or accept rides from people you don’t know. We all have lists of things our parents told us not to do; some of them we heeded and some of them we did not.
Feeling safe isn’t only about protecting a child from physical harm. Feeling safe is also felt in the heart, and it doesn’t come easily. Once the rug has been pulled out from under them, it’s difficult to get that child to trust again…to feel safe. Imagine what it’s like for a child to be removed from the only home he has known. Removed from parents, familiar surroundings and life as the child has known it. How can that child ever feel safe again? How can that child learn to trust that this won’t happen again? We all know that there are no guarantees, no matter how hard we try to make it better.
At A Kid’s Place, we provide safety for the children in our care. Safety that the child will experience no further trauma. Safety that no one will cause pain, be it physical or emotional. And safety that we’re not here to judge what brought the child into foster care, but instead be understanding of it. Safety is much more than a list of “don’ts,” although all children need to know the basics: No one should ever hit you. No one should let you be hungry. Loving arms, understanding hearts and the promise of simply being there. That’s the safety in A Kid’s Place mission.