By Aidan Mortensen | KOAL News

Looking to support foster parents and children alike, Utah Foster Care works tirelessly to achieve its mission of finding, educating, and nurturing families to meet the needs of children in Foster Care. Due to this dedication, Utah Foster Care has been named Castle Country Radio’s Charity of the Month for May. 

Kobi Prettyman joined the KOAL Newsroom to discuss the organization and inform the public about the need for foster families in the Castle Country.

“Utah’s Foster Care’s goal and mission is to find families that are willing to take children into their homes, provide them the training that they need so that they can adequately support the children, and then to provide support to them once they have the children so that they have the things they need,” shared Prettyman of the organization’s mission. “They have emotional support and the other things involved with being a foster parent.”

While the number of children in the foster care system has remained consistent, the number of participating families has dropped significantly. “We need families that are willing to step up and consider if this might be something that could work for their families to help children in our community while their families are working their situations out and hopefully return home. The ultimate goal of foster care is that it’s a short-term placement. Sometimes, that’s not always how it works out, and the children stay longer or even end up being adopted. But we need families willing to consider any or all of those options for children,” said Prettyman.

To help encourage families to participate in the program, Utah Foster Care has several support systems to ease some of the burdens foster parents may face. “There’s a lot of support from the Division of Child and Family Services and Utah Foster Care. There are mentors that help the families along the way. There’s financial support to help get the children involved in activities. There are support groups. There’s individual therapy that the families can attend if they’re struggling with any aspect of it. And there’s also the hope of developing some more communities in our area. And so we want people to step up to help provide that space as well where they could wrap around families and provide them even additional support.”

Walking through the process of joining the foster care program, Prettyman explained,” There is some up-front stuff. We do a safety inspection on their home, and they do some training. So, like we say, they’re adequately able to handle the children. And then there’s also a background check and things like that. So that’s the initial stuff to get going. After that, they have placements, and there’s all sorts of support like we just described to help them. So if a family is interested in any of the aspects of foster care, they would just need to get a hold of me to get that started.”

Prettyman can be contacted at 435-269-5978 or through UtahFosterCare.org. 

To help educate curious families about the foster care system, Utah Foster Care will host a ‘Together for Foster Care’ event on May 12 in Price. Prettyman discussed what this will entail,” This event is aimed to help people know what the process looks like. Some of those things we just talked about: how do you get the background check, the training, and all those things? So we walk them through the process, and then we walk through the supports in more detail.”

Prettyman continued,” So if it’s something that they’ve thought, ‘well, I don’t know if that would work for me,’ or ‘I don’t know if that’s too much to get involved in,’ or ‘what’s all the red tape or the paperwork?’ We’re here to answer all those questions in this event. So we’d like to have people come out and talk to us, get some information, and see if it might work for their family.”

Preregistration for the event is available online here.

Closing our conversation, Prettyman shared,” Just think about whether there’s a space where you can help support children experiencing foster care in our community. And whatever that might be, we would love to help get you engaged with that.”