It's the start of a new year which means an opportunity to support 12 new organizations and/or families through The Dollar Difference! To start us off, we will be supporting the "Say Yes to FAMILY" initiative for the month of January.

Say Yes to FAMILY, is a program through Bethany Christian Services that supports kinship caregivers. The program integrates both evidence-based and innovative practices and is built on three core pillars:

1. Innovative Kinship Placement and Support : to ensure that children who enter the child welfare system are quickly placed and remain in a stable and supportive kinship placement to ensure important family connections are preserved.

2. Effective Shared Parenting : to build strong birthparent, foster/kinship caregiver partnerships to ensure birthparents remain actively involved in the child’s life and to support timely, stable reunifications.

3. Family-Centric System Transformation : to develop a transformative experience and process to change culture by creatively engaging and supporting birth parents, foster and kinship caregivers, and children, ensuring their voices are elevated and the community moves toward child welfare system transformation that will embrace critical elements of kinship support, shared parenting, and race equity strategies.

The Say Yes to Family team was SO excited to brainstorm a fun and creative way to use the funds received from The Dollar Difference, and they landed on throwing a county-wide (Ottawa & Kent) Family Fun Day in the Spring. They will source and reserve space at a couple of local venues to create a “Choose Your Own Adventure” type of day for families to interact in. Each family can decide which events will work best for their kids and choose to attend one, two, or all of the events.

Not that we want to wish Winter away, but we look forward to seeing this event come to life in the Spring, and to support the kinship families in our community.