Offer Soul Care to Foster and Adoptive Families

Hi, my name is Alex, and I am fundraising for Soul Care Retreats for foster and adoptive families for my 40th birthday. Since I'm going to be 40 years old, I am aiming for 40 Donations of 40 Pounds! Earlier this year my family and I made active steps towards a long term dream of ours to launch Starfish Soul Care, a project seeking to offer support, rest and nurture for foster and adoptive families. Off the back of a personal gift, we decided to run a pilot family soul care retreat for 6 families in collaboration with Penuel Children’s Foundation and hosted by Glenside Farm. This was a success, and we would love to do 3 more of these in the next number of months. £1600 would allow this to happen.

As foster carers and adopters ourselves, we experienced first-hand the physical, emotional and spiritual exhaustion and compassion fatigue that comes with welcoming children into your home, loving them as your own, and either going through the long and challenging process of becoming their forever family, or the equally long and challenging process of moving them on to another forever family. We just longed for somewhere to go where we could receive support, rest and nurture for our weary bodies and souls. I remember my wife once saying to our social worker, “I don’t know how you manage to keep doing this day in and day out.” The social worker replied, “For me, this is my job. But for you, this is your life.”

We’ve always loved the Starfish story of the little boy walking along the shore where loads of starfish have been left behind by the tide and throwing them back in one by one. A man sees him doing this and criticises the boy, saying, “There are hundreds of starfish on this beach. Do you really think you can make a difference?” To which the child replies, while throwing a starfish back into the sea, “Made a difference to that one!” This is the heart behind Starfish Soul Care, to make a difference one child and family at a time.

In this, my 40th year on the planet, I’d love to make a difference to more children and families.

3 notes:

1. While the 40, 40, 40 campaign is catchy, any donation above or below £40 is also welcome (i.e. 80 donations of £20, or 160 donations of £10) and will still help us reach our goal.

2. Any money over the desired amount will just allow us to offer more retreats. In the long run we’d love to be able to offer overnight retreats as well.

3. Thank you! For so much of our lives we have been blessed by the generosity of others. We love that we can pay this forward in this way to support families who look after these precious children.

 

2024 Update

This fundraiser has now finished, thanks to all who donated! If you want to find out more about what we've been doing as a project for the past 2 years, join our contact list, find out about events or donate visit us at https://www.penuelchildren.com/starfish-soul-care

A&K