Foster-Care Group Finds an Answer in Church Families

In Los Angeles, some insights occur on the freeway.

It happened to Mary Rotzien four years ago as she was driving home from the MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte, where she was doing an internship in clinical psychology. Rotzien was overwhelmed by the desperate needs of the abused and abandoned children who are sent to MacLaren by Los Angeles County. The facility was overcrowded and overtaxed. A 2-year-old child might be dropped off in the middle of the night, shown to a bed and be left alone.

It occurred to Rotzien as she sat in rush-hour traffic that the problems at MacLaren were countywide, that she had to expand her vision and consider the deficiencies of the entire foster-care system. There were not enough caring foster families to go around and a lack of support services for those who were willing to take on a 2-year-old in the middle of the night.

The solution came to her days later during a Bible study class. A woman in the study group mentioned that she had kept her child’s crib and baby supplies in the garage, just in case she ever had to care for a baby.

“Let’s get these needy babies into church families, backed by the support and the healing components of the religious community,” Rotzien recalled thinking.

The idea she had that day has become Child S.H.A.R.E. (Shelter Homes: A Rescue Effort), a foster family recruitment and support organization.

Rotzien and her husband, attorney Brian F. Buchanan, persuaded Westwood Presbyterian Church, where they were members, to back her plan.

She set up an office in her Eagle Rock garage and started to write ministers in Southern California in an effort to persuade them to back Child S.H.A.R.E. Rotzien prepared grant applications, spoke to interested groups and finished her doctorate. Rotzien, who was pregnant, ultimately took a quarter away from school so she would have time to work on the project.

“I just believed in what I was doing,” said Rotzien, 37. “I’m a compulsive worker, and I just believed God would overcome everything.”

When she applied to the California Community Foundation for her first grant, the woman evaluating the application was surprised to find that she was interviewing Rotzien in her garage. But Rotzien got the $20,000 grant.

The first child was placed in a foster home through Child S.H.A.R.E. almost a year after Rotzien’s moment of freeway insight. She remembers counseling the new foster parents on the phone as her own newborn baby screamed with colic in the background. For the first two years of the program’s existence, Rotzien and her husband did all the work.

Now Child S.H.A.R.E. has a $125,000 annual budget ($175,000 projected for 1990), is involved with about 30 churches of several faiths and has a network of 50 foster-care certified families.

The Van Nuys-based organization, said Susan Bothe, its present director, is dedicated to recruiting volunteers from the religious community to provide shelter care for abused, neglected and abandoned children in the county. Child S.H.A.R.E. recruits foster parents who are screened by the Children’s Bureau of Los Angeles, a nonprofit social services agency, for the county Department of Children’s Services. Bothe said the organization gets about 65% of its income from private foundation grants, such as the Stuart Foundation, the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation and the Lon V. Smith Foundation.

According to Odile Robinson, foster-care supervisor for the Children’s Bureau, “There are at any given moment in Los Angeles County 15,000 to 18,000 children in foster care and over 30,000 children in the county in need of foster care.” When there aren’t enough foster homes available, she said, “children tend to go back to their homes sooner, before the family has had enough time to overcome the crisis that sent that child into care in the first place.”

Child S.H.A.R.E. recruits 40% of the families that the Children’s Bureau of Los Angeles certifies for foster care, and it has built a multilevel support system that provides everything from baby-sitting to give foster parents a break or a vacation, to equipment, counseling and seminars.

Robinson said that “not only is Child S.H.A.R.E. able to recruit foster parents, but they recruit parents who stay and do a good job.” She said the philosophy of Child S.H.A.R.E. ties in well with the goals of the Children’s Bureau, which are to “support, preserve and maintain the original family.” What is needed “are homes that can take younger children--half of the foster-care children are less than 2--and can work toward the rehabilitation of the parent so that the child can return home. Child S.H.A.R.E. does not encourage foster parents to come in to rescue the child but to play a role in preserving the family as a whole.”

“The Child S.H.A.R.E. staff makes becoming a foster parent as easy as possible,” said Helen Gibbons, 52, a North Hollywood participant in the program. Gibbons and her husband, Don, 54, a part-time custodian at Magnolia Park Methodist Church in Burbank, have raised three children of their own and now care for four foster children ages 2 to 5. “They set up the whole clearance process, which includes fingerprints, TB tests, a physical examination, and helped you get what you needed quickly and easily, with no cost,” she said.

“We probably never would have done this without Child S.H.A.R.E.,” said Gibbons, who plans to continue as a foster parent for one more year before she and her husband retire and move. “We’ve wanted to do it over the years and just never found out, so when they came to the church, we were motivated.”

According to Alex Morales, associate executive director of the Children’s Bureau, recruiting foster parents from churches and other religious groups is not new, but what is innovative about Child S.H.A.R.E. is that its representatives can speak to churches and synagogues as members of the religious community. “They’re coming from within the church so they’re able to feel and explain what it’s all about,” he said.

Child S.H.A.R.E. foster parents say the support network provided by the religious community has been crucial. Lynn Talab, 35, a single parent and part-time paralegal, has two sons, 7 and 9, and a 4-year-old foster daughter from El Salvador. “I couldn’t be a foster parent without Child S.H.A.R.E.,” she said. “I had to fly out of town for a death in the family, and they set up baby-sitters for me.”

Talab said that when she was having a particularly difficult problem with her foster daughter, the staff at Child S.H.A.R.E. connected her with another foster parent who had a similar experience.

For many of the Child S.H.A.R.E. recruits, foster parenting is a calling. Carrie Lawhon, 31, a computer programmer who is single, said: “I got into it because I went through a period of a lot of loss, and I came through all of it, and I found I had a need to give back.”

Lawhon had experienced the death of her premature infant son, a divorce and a miscarriage, and when she heard about Child S.H.A.R.E. through a friend, she thought that the additional support system the organization provided was just what she needed to succeed as a foster parent.

Lawhon learned that she was certified as a foster parent on the day that would have been her son’s third birthday. Her first foster child was a 5-year-old girl with severe emotional difficulties who was able, Lawhon said, to resolve many of her problems during the year they were together.

The hardest part of foster parenting was “just being in a position of not knowing how to handle a situation,” she said. “When they’re behaving a certain way--very angry or out of control--I just didn’t know what to do. But I could pick up the phone and call someone in Child S.H.A.R.E. and say, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ And they were there.”

For many foster parents, the toughest part is saying goodby. When Don Gibbons had to give up an 18-month-old boy he and his wife had cared for since the child’s infancy, he said it felt like he had lost a son.

“I didn’t think I would ever feel so bad for so long or hurt so bad as I did when he left,” Gibbons said. “He was calling me Daddy. We’ll probably never see him again, but we just hope that when these kids go back to their families, that they’ll remember how good life can be and strive for it.”

Many of the seminars that Child S.H.A.R.E. offers its foster parents are designed to help to prepare parents for the grief and loss they will experience when the children return home.

“Foster parenting takes a real wrestling with what being a parent ought to be,” Morales said. “When you struggle with the fact that you don’t own the child, it helps you perhaps reach a more ideal parenting role. You’re a part of their life. You help launch them.”