Help the Carrs Prepare for Foster Care

Hello! Thanks for your interest in supporting us (Jonathan and Amy Carr) as we prepare to be foster parents! We feel so encouraged by the love of our community and know we aren't going into this alone!

The Story:

The journey to becoming foster parents has been a long one, with quite a few twists and turns. In fall 2020, Jonathan and I decided to begin the foster care training process and were nearly to the home study portion when our home flooded in February 2021. Right as I was getting ready to draw our fire evacuation plan to post on our exits (a requirement of every foster home), our house was stripped down to the studs while we lived in a hotel for six weeks. By the time we had finished a massive water mitigation process and resulting remodel of our kitchen, we learned our foster trainings had expired and we needed to start over. In this undoing over the span of two years, we had the rare opportunity to evaluate our desire to be foster parents and consider if we wanted to try again. It also gave us some much needed space to process our motivations.

Many of you know that Jonathan and I began attempting to start a family in 2012, two years after we got married. What we have learned over the past 13 years of infertility is that building a family in any form is fraught with challenges. It breaks you down and rebuilds you into a new human who is capable of serving the needs of another person day in and day out. It rarely goes according to plan, but it also brings some of the greatest joys this world can afford. We've watched this in the lives of our friends over the last decade. We've been adopted into a community where we've been free to love the parents and children around us as we processed the grief associated with our own unmet expectations. We have learned how to be parents by proxy (and formally through our training), all the while wondering how these examples would shape our own family over time.

Although we both had an interest in fostering before our experience with infertility, when we began the process in 2020 our desire to foster took on an additional layer: we wondered if it might be a way to grow our family. While reunification is always the original goal, adoption is not uncommon in the social services industry. Over 50,000 kids were adopted out of the foster care system in 2022 (the last year of data), the majority of which were adopted by the foster family. But there was a rub we could never quite get around: we didn't want to begin this important work of fostering to meet our need for a biological child. That would set us and the foster child up to fail in more ways than we can count. The directionality of this relationship had to be toward the foster kid or we would risk only adding to that child's pain during their season of greatest need. So after the flood debacle of 2021 gave us some space to think, we evaluated all other options for growing our family biologically. And in 2025, we came back to foster care, but this time for fostering's sake.

In January 2025, I texted Jonathan and said simply "I am feeling like I have love to give a kid who needs a safe place." We agreed to restart the foster care process with a new organization (SAFY) that specializes in trauma-informed foster care training. Their goal is to be the last placement for the children in their agency, some of whom are on their 30th placement by the time they get to SAFY. Along with traditional foster care, SAFY also provides treatment and therapeutic care for kids with additional support needs. We've been so impressed with the organization so far. We'll start with traditional foster care and potentially move up to higher support level later. We are looking at fostering a school-aged kid or sibling set between the ages of 4-10. We also plan to partner with the child(ren)'s parents to support their reunification goals as much as possible. We would like to take our first placement in August 2025 - we've completed our trainings and will wrap up our home study process in June.

The Ask:

So here is where you come in. As we prepare our home, we have a long list of things we need:

We will cover the cost of whatever we need to as part of our commitment to providing this care, but we also know our community may want to support us financially. We also know we will need to buy a more reliable and larger vehicle for Amy and are trying to stretch our own finances as much as possible to accommodate our set up needs along with this purchase. If you would like to join us, we will be grateful for any level of support. All donated funds will go into a savings account we will draw from as we prepare our home and after we receive a placement. We will also happily take donations in the form of hand-me-downs when it comes to clothes, books, toys, etc. If you're getting ready to send a child-sized desk to Goodwill, for example, hit me up.

Thank you in advance for your partnership with us! Our community is one of the greatest in the world. Let's do this thing together.

Amy and Jonathan