Knit Together-A Foster Care Closet
Every day, children enter the foster care system with very little - sometimes even just the clothes they are wearing. Sometimes they're emergency removals where there was too little time to get anything else; sometimes very little was all they had to start with. Regardless of the cause, foster families all over the country receive children into their care with little to no belongings and sometimes little to no notice. Given the age range of potential placements, it's a burden on foster and kinship families to try and be prepared with clothing, necessities, and baby needs for any given placement all the time.
Picture this scenario: You're 11. You've been removed from your parents and your home for reasons you may or may not understand. You may have been neglected or abused. And you're about to enter a home full of strangers with little to no personal belongings. You're traumatized, confused, and scared.
In this moment, a child may feel cast aside, abandoned, unloved, or unworthy. In this moment we believe that the last place a child needs to be is in a secondhand store or resale shop. Think of the visual representation such a place can be to the child.
That's where we come in. We are Knit Together, a charity serving both children in foster care and foster families in the Central Texas/Big Country area. We're opening a Foster Care Closet in Brownwood, Texas as the first step into building a ministry that supports and edifies the entire foster community in the Big Country area - a ministry desperately needed in our region.
A Foster Care Closet is like a clothing store, except that it serves exclusively children in the foster system and everything is provided for free! We take donations of gently used clothes, shoes, and other items as well as new toiletries, baby items, diapers, etc and provide them to foster children free of charge.
Our goal is to provide these necessities for foster families to help facilitate short notice placements and ease abrupt transitions for the children being placed. We believe that children in the foster system should be able to experience the dignity, kindness, and love they deserve while trying to adjust to life in a new placement.
We're building a special kind of Foster Care Closet; one that looks and feels like a unique shopping experience - one that feels as special as the kids themselves.
Knit Together is currently partnering with Coggin Avenue Baptist Church in Brownwood, and our goal is to eventually reach far beyond that and build a community of support from multiple churches, local businesses, and the wonderful and generous people from our area. CABC has generously agreed to allow Knit Together to use a vacated home as our base of operations and location for our closet. We are blessed by the enthusiasm shown by our church and the excitement of the staff!
That's where you come in. The house needs a lot of work to get it into the shape we want it to be. Looks are deceiving - this house has "good bones", as they say, but it needs plenty of help.
We have spent hours already measuring, budgeting, and planning this house. It might look like a dump now, but with God's guidance and vision for this ministry, to us it looks like a perfect place to begin!
Our goal is to raise $4,500 for renovations. We believe that isn't an insurmountable number and it's going to cover a lot of work:
* Installing New Ceilings ~ $1,200
* Restoring Hardwood Floors ~ $600
* Painting Walls ~ $400
*Landscaping ~ $0 (no materials - just elbow grease)
*Replacing Windows ~ $300
*Purchasing AC Units, a Washer and Dryer, and a new Toilet ~ $1,000
*Building Store Fixtures ~ $500
*Changing Lighting ~ $400
We know that seems low, but that's just materials. We're ready and willing and able to do all the needed work ourselves. However, we are praying that we have a large number of volunteers as passionate and driven as we are about helping foster families!
We want Knit Together to feel like a unique, specialty shopping experience. We have worked hard to plan the decor and fixtures to be a semi-upscale boutique with rustic charm. We want the families entering to feel treasured, cared for, and loved, and we want to be very intentional with our layout and vision for this location.
The remainder of our fundraising goal is to pay for the first year operating costs of the ministry. The house is being provided for free, but we will be responsible for the costs of maintaining the house, which is estimated to cost $400 a month - insurance and utilities. Having these costs taken care of ahead of time frees us up to do the work of supporting foster children and families in our area instead of worrying about making our monthly bills.
The sooner we raise these funds, the sooner we can start impacting our community! The sooner we can open our doors, the sooner we can welcome these kids into Knit Together! Our goal is to be open and ready by November 1, 2018.