How can we work towards
More Than Enough in our community?

Let’s start with the easy stuff. Brainstorm every person, organization, agency, and church you know that has any involvement in foster care. This could include foster families, case workers, CASA volunteers, mentoring organizations, family law attorneys, teachers, and youth pastors, See if you can come up with at least 30. This goes faster if you do it with a friend or two. You will create a master contact list from this group (a Google sheet is a great way to do this and will facilitate future collaboration). Provide columns to track your interactions, their interest in collaborating, and basic info about the things they are involved in.

A good place to start is to identify those in your community who might already be praying together on a regular basis and find out if it might be possible to introduce the subject of children in foster care as a part of their normal prayer times.

 Beyond that, here are a few other ways that you can make prayer a foundational part of your movement-building effort early on:

1. Gather for an evening with others in your community for a foster care prayer vigil.   While you can do this at any time of the year, Focus on the Family sponsors the National Foster Care Prayer Vigil in May each year (visit FosterCarePrayerVigil.org).
2. Start a local weekly 15-minute foster care prayer call (early mornings or lunchtimes work great).  We suggest using a video conference service like Zoom.  We’ve found that people are more likely to keep coming when there is face-to-face interaction on a video call.
3. Join an existing weekly 15-minute state foster care prayer call by visiting MoreThanEnoughTogether.org.

 *To help facilitate your prayer times, you can find our National Foster Care Prayer Guide HERE.

You should begin by finding out some basic information. Some of this information may be available for your county on our More Than Enough Foster Care Data Exchange.

As you seek to evaluate your current situation and interact with child welfare professionals and agencies, keep these questions in mind.  They will help you get a more complete picture of the current state of affairs:

1. In your opinion, what are the most significant challenges facing vulnerable families in our community?
2. What do you think could be done to help these families so fewer children end up in foster care?
3. What challenges have you encountered in recruiting foster and adoptive families?
4. Once a potential adoptive or foster family comes to an informational meeting, what barriers do you see that might prevent them from completing the process?
5. What new initiatives or ideas are you working on that you are most excited about?
6. What areas of the foster care system would you most like to see change?
7. What organizations, leaders, or councils do you currently work with to coordinate efforts for community involvement?
8. Have you ever partnered with churches on the issue of foster care in the past? If so, how did it work? What were the challenges? What went well?
9. I am interested in learning as much as possible about how churches in our community can best serve kids and families in foster care. Who else should I be talking to?
10.  Is there anything else you feel is important for me to know as I explore?

Once you’ve found your core ensemble cast, built a simple prayer strategy, and gathered some initial data about the current situation, it is time to get a larger group together in the same room. Your goal here is to gather key people together to cast vision and explore the possibilities. Your ongoing strategic planning will be conducted by a much smaller team (your ensemble cast) on a once or twice per month basis. However, this event is a way of gathering a more significant number of key leaders in your community around this issue. Remember, your goal as an organization is to push leadership as much as possible to churches in the community. If you don’t, you’ll be in danger of being just another community organization asking pastors to help you achieve your mission. As an organization serving churches, your primary objective should be to help the church achieve its mission: to love the children and families in its community with the love of Christ.

To go deeper on each of these steps, check out appendix A of the book Until There’s More Than Enough.