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The services we offer are executed with love, dedication, and commitment. We believe in the impact of offering direct and indirect assistance to children and families so that they can live a better today and grow in hope for a brighter future. We are more than a community, we are a family! We are here to bring change in their lives and in yours!
Did you know? An estimated 20,000 kids enter foster care in the state of Florida each year. This number only includes children who are citizens. When children are removed from dangerous situations to enter foster care, all they are permitted to bring must fit into a trash bag.
Children deserve better than a trash bag. We want to provide a gift of hope to restore the dignity of so many kids in foster care that feel uncared for when taken from their families by replacing trash bags with duffle bags for their belongings.
Our Baggy Bag Program helps ease the hard transition children and teenagers need to make coming into the foster system. We put together personalized duffle bags with lots of love and surprises inside. We then deliver them to social workers and foster cares so that the youth’s first encounter is a warm welcome within their difficult circumstance.
As we work side by side foster care organizations, we’ve witnessed the love and extreme dedication that those who work there have for the children and teenagers. Unfortunately, oftentimes we’ve realized that many of these care centers have limited resources.
Our Shine Brighter program is an initiative to work closely with these organizations through different projects that are created to improve the quality of life of foster care children and teenagers. We want to provide opportunities to reinforce their God-given value by helping to bring some stability, emotional, and interpersonal growth within their circumstances. When we come together to help form confident children now, we help create confident adults tomorrow.
We try our best to assist foster care organizations by first getting to know the organization and its staff, listening carefully to their needs. We then create projects that will provide for those needs along with our support team of volunteers and sponsors.
Projects we have done within Shine Brighter:
Music and art is much more than a hobby or skill to learn and develop. They are a method to express and heal.
We want to encourage those children and teenagers in foster care who have a passion in the arts, to develop that passion and use it as an instrument to change their lives. For those that don’t have the passion, we want to motivate them to discover its therapeutic qualities to help them better express themselves.
The impact we want to create through this program is to help them:
– Develop skills to be used as a profession in the arts
– Heal through self -expression
– Provide an outlet to bring youth out of their bad habits
– Empower their dreams and passions
– Feel valuable and capable
We are currently looking to make partnerships with schools of music and arts, in order to provide quality resources to children and teenagers in foster care as well as in single parent families in need. If you are interested in collaborating, please click below.
We partner with different sites and institutions to make career trips possible.
We take foster teenagers ages 16 to 17 to different businesses and organizations for them to visualize and experience firsthand, different career opportunities, outside of what they know. Our aim is to expand their opportunities for them to reach their fullest potential.
The impact we want to create through this program is to help them:
The Amigos Trip Program offers foster care children and teenagers the freedom to explore the world outside of their often limiting circumstances, inflexible rules, and little to no leisure time.
We want to give the opportunity for children to hope for a better tomorrow by living a better today with all the beautiful things the world has to offer. In sharing wonderful moments of joy, affection, and adventure with volunteers and their peers, there is a chance to boost their emotional intelligence, build self-confidence, and help alleviate some of their emotional burdens. Moreover, these trips are very valuable for creating meaningful friendships, both for the volunteers and for the young.
With the appropriate precautions and logistics, we take a group of children out for the day to a specific location where, along with the activities chosen, they are exposed to different forms of entertainment and educational opportunities.
One of our core values is the importance of family. No family should be separated or forced to take drastic measures that affect their children because of lack of resources. We cherish family unity immensely and VM seeks to facilitate financial resources, emotional support, and tools that will help single families grow and stay together.
Spoon of Love creates a better community by directly assisting single mothers, fathers, and their children. In doing this, we may be able to reduce the number of parents who want to provide for their children and aren’t able to, and youth that go into foster care for lack of resources at home.
We first get to know each single parent family household and their immediate needs and worries. We then offer the necessary resources according to the needs of the family. For better long lasting results, we join them on their walk for a better life and check in with them after about 6 months.
We appreciate all the love and sacrifice put into giving what you can for the cause. By supporting us month to month, we can have the reassurance of being able to reach even more families and children in foster care that are in need. Your help goes a long way because we can do remarkable things working together!
“We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”
-Mother Teresa of Calcutta
