‘Home for Good’
Home for Good began life as a campaign started by the UK Evangelical Alliance to promote church involvement in fostering and adoption. It has continued as a movement jointly sponsored by EAUK, Care for the Family, and CCPAS. It is now becoming a charity in its own right, to have a permanent existence.
I’ve been on the council of the EA for about four years now, and a member of its board for the last couple; I’m honoured to be involved with a great organisation doing many wonderful things, and I’m proud of most of the things to which we, as a board, have been able to give permission, funding, prayer, and encouragement. But Home for Good is probably the one thing we’ve started that I am most inspired by.
I remember the lightbulb moment when Krish Kandiah first showed us the number of children in care in the UK, and then the number of evangelical churches, and offered the simple comment that if every church could encourage, equip, and release its members to adopt or foster one child, we could shut down the UK care system. It was a vision so simple, so audacious, and yet so achievable, that it was impossible not to be inspired by it.
I remember reading Krish and Miriam’s Home for Good book in draft, checking for theological comments; after I’d read through the stories of how the lives of vulnerable children can be transformed, I wanted to add a comment about interpreting 1 Peter, and had to wipe tears off my keyboard to type it.
I remember our collective excitement as we saw the vision begin to catch, and began to hear the stories of people and churches becoming motivated to do something, to make a difference to the lives of the most needy children in our society.
The time has now come for EAUK to let go, and for Home for Good to become something separate and permanent; we did the same with Tearfund back in the day. To get established, H4G needs some start-up costs quickly; there is a fund raising campaign running; this is an excellent cause and well worth supporting.
Excited to hear about this new venture! I’ve been saying for years that if every Christian family just adopted or fostered 1 child than the orphan problem would be taken care of worldwide!
Personally, I am a single woman and won’t foster or adopt unless I’m married (I’m not against it, I just know that I don’t have the stamina to be a single parent). With that in mind, and with your experiences in H4G, do you have any suggestions for those of us who aren’t currently caregiving for children on how we can best support those families who are?
Thanks for stopping by Rachel; great question! I won’t presume to speak for H4G, but one of the things that has struck me about Krish’s vision was the focus on the local church agreeing to release, equip, and support foster carers/adoptive parents; recognising the work involved, the church leadership need to release people from other activities, and other members of the church can make an enormous difference by offering to be available – baby sitting to allow the fostering couple an afternoon off, or caring for birth children when the couple need to be at adoption panels or similar; being a confidante for an older birth child who is struggling with some conflicting feelings about the new arrangements, or a friendly face prepared to roll around the back (or front…) of the hall with a young fostered child who is not used to sitting still in church meetings (or a Sunday carer for an older child who chooses not to attend church, so that on some weeks at least the parents can both go). The old line about ‘it taking a village to raise a child’ valorised rural life unacceptably, but it certainly takes a community to raise a child, and probably the more so a child who is in need of foster care or who is transitioning out of the care system.