Spring Arrives for Children in Foster Care

Spring Arrives for Children in Foster Care

What if a baseball bat wasn’t just a baseball bat? What if it was a chance to get involved in a new community and new school after your father passed away and you recently moved? What if it was an opportunity to be part of a healthy, fun sport where you could learn valuable life skills and make new friends? And what if you were too tall to use your teammates’ bats? That’s when a bat is more than a bat and what a new baseball bat meant to JR, one of our children in foster care who went through a terrible winter.   

But baseball also means that spring is finally here after this long hard year. For the children, teenagers, and young adults that 4Montgomery’s Kids serves, it means a return to school, sports, summer camp, and employment. As for JR, it may mean new beginnings and a return to a more normal way of life.

Things have been exceptionally tough for children in the foster care system. Between July 2020 and March 2021, there were almost 7,000 calls to Montgomery County’s Child Welfare to report child abuse and neglect. The average number of children and youth in foster care is 435 each month. In addition, 110 children remain with their biological families but are being monitored by social workers. There is also concern that because most children have not been in school an important source of identifying children being mistreated has been missing. At the same time, young adults who are aging out of Child Welfare are unable to find jobs to cover housing and other expenses.

Thanks to our generous donors, 4MK has been able to quickly and fully respond to every request we have received this past year! From families experiencing food insecurity to students needing laptops, to young adults unable to pay rent, and, yes, to a baseball bat for JR. In the words of one of our donors, 4MK has kept “these kids in the forefront during this tragic time for our country” and it’s only through your help we have been able to do it.  

Donor Spotlight: the Ammerman Family Foundation

Donor Spotlight: the Ammerman Family Foundation

Joy Ammerman is a long-time resident of Montgomery County where she raised her three children and taught school. She manages the Ammerman Family Foundation to give back to the community that has been so good to her family.
 
In deciding what organizations to support Joy often looks to her children for suggestions. Her daughter-in-law attended our Zoom Workout fundraiser and told Joy about “this organization that provides money to youth aging out of foster care.”  She chose to make a generous contribution earmarked to helping these young adults. With Joy’s gift, we will have supported fifteen foster youth who are aging out by paying for furnishings, professional work clothes, tuition, loan repayment, auto expenses, transportation, groceries, computers, and more.
 
Joy feels rewarded by the thought that her contribution will make a difference right here in Montgomery County. She hopes through her gift and the example she set that someday the young adults she is supporting will be able to give back as well. (Thank you, Joy!)

Without you, our donors, we could not continue to help the children and young adults who continue to face great difficulties as they try to overcome the trauma from child abuse and neglect. So please, now more than ever, help us help our community.

Fall 2020 Update

Fall 2020 Update

We are living in a difficult time, one that has forced all of us to rearrange our lives. Children and their families in Montgomery County’s Child Welfare System have been particularly hard hit. In September there were 436 children in foster care in the county.  Additionally, there are children receiving services in 95 homes where, despite a finding of abuse and neglect, the situation was not deemed serious enough to place the children into foster care.

The 4MK board continues to partner with social workers in Child Welfare to help. We have been concentrating on families and, particularly, on older foster youth as they move ahead with their lives. The state of Maryland also is focusing on the hardships these young adults face. Maryland is now allowing them to stay in the foster care system for an extra six months, even when they would have aged out at twenty one. This will affect eleven young adults.  But so many of them still need services, including help with rent, support for transportation to school and jobs, and money for basic living needs, and we can help with some of these. 

Here are just a handful of requests Montgomery County social workers asked us to fill in the last six months. We were able to fill all of them because of your support:

Helping with housing costs for ten older youth moving into their first apartments

  • Purchasing fourteen Chromebooks to assist with online learning
  • Awarding nine college scholarships for youth graduating from high school
  • Paying for transportation so a mother could visit her daughter in preparation for reunification
  • Buying a large dining room table for an aunt who had four foster kids placed with her in addition to her own already large family. Now they can all eat together
  • Purchasing bunk beds for four children who now live with relatives after they were removed from their parents’ home
  • Providing special camps and gym activities for foster children whose camps were closed due to Covid-19   
N

Let us introduce to you some young people your contributions have helped:

N is a young woman just leaving the foster care system. She loves graphic design and is a self-taught artist. Her designs for filters were recently accepted by Instagram. 4MK, through your donations, bought her a MacBook, the key tool she needs to pursue both her education and her passion for graphic art.

J

J is a kind and resilient young person preparing to move into her first apartment. She has completed two semesters at Montgomery College in addition to having finished her Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) degree. She currently is focused on working and saving money. With your contributions, 4MK helped pay her rent, and J now is managing her expenses and looking forward to being on her own.

And here is how L expressed her thanks for 4MK:

 “I am a youth in foster care and I had the support of 4Montgomery’s Kids. They helped me when I was pregnant and needed baby supplies. I am thankful because I was not working because of COVID, and did not have anything for my baby. They helped me a lot.”

Workout for Good

Workout for Good

Workout for Good

What an amazing evening. 

On September 22, 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic,  we hosted a virtual exercise class, led by one of the premier trainers in the DMV, Jennifer Blackburn.  Forty five minutes of heart pumping exercise was preceded by a presentation from two former foster youth who have aged out of the child welfare system but were the beneficiaries of assistance from 4Montgomery’s Kids.  One of the speakers who just graduated from medical school discussed how she was able to concentrate on taking her medical exams knowing that we were there to help her out.  The other speaker told us how she was able to get to school and her job when we helped pay for her parking and her car repairs. 

We never imagined that with all the chaos in the world our donors, new and old, would come together to make this one of our most successful fundraisers ever.  More than 80 people took part in this virtual event.  It is not too late to do even more!!

Thank you!

Thank you!

For over five years now and with the generous support of donors like you – THANK YOU SO MUCH! – 4 Montgomery’s Kids has helped close to 700 foster kids in the county’s Child Welfare System. But today these kids are more vulnerable than ever. Their schools, from elementary to college, are closed. They can’t participate in any of their favorite activities. They are even more uncertain about their futures than they ever were. While this is true of all the children in the county, children and youth in foster care are often in particularly precarious situations during this pandemic.
 
Our wonderful social workers are working remotely, still protecting children. We are working with them to be as responsive as we can to their requests for help. Here are just a few recent ones we have answered. We’ve:
 
– bought grocery store cards to help those having trouble getting food since many families are not working
– provided a laptop for a child who moved from one foster home to another in the midst of all this; she needed the laptop to keep up with schoolwork and her computer was at her old school 
– helped cover rent for a youth who is aging out of foster care and lost her job at a hair salon when it closed down
– helped a mother whose car broke down going to work; we paid to get her car fixed after the mechanic gave a reduced rate
– bought Metro cards, including one for a young woman who works as a nursing assistant but doesn’t have enough money to pay for rent, food, and transportation
– sent in deposits for children who want to go to camp this summer to hold their places until we find out if the camp will open
 
Sure, the past few weeks have been challenging for all of us, but foster kids are among the most vulnerable among us. Thank you to all who gave gifts to 4Montogmerys Kids so that we could help during this particularly difficult time