Child Welfare agency in South Florida that cares for abused and neglected children
We are a child abuse agency who is currently taking care of 350 children thru our different services.
At the Village, which is the only village of its kind in the country we provide temporary and permanent housing for infants up to 21 years old. We also have social workers, therapists, medical staff and psychologist that work at the village and are available to us at anytime.
Our shelter sleeps 16 children and it is for temporary placement of younger children, infants up to 12 years old. When a child is taken out of their home the courts usually give the parents up to a year to rehabilitate themselves, in the interim we need to find a safe home for these children. While we are searching for a family member or foster family to take care of these children, they can stay in our shelter. A lot of children that come to us have been born addicted to crack, have been physically or sexually abused or have been caught between a fight with their parents and injured badly. We have trained staff here to deal with all of these situations and sometimes it’s better for the child to rehabilitate here then to go directly into a foster family or into the house of another family member because the worst thing for these children is a placement not working out and them being rejected once again. The reason the shelter is temporary is because it’s used for younger children who people in the community want to foster and adopt unlike the older kids.
Our group home program at the village is for older children ages 12-21. We have 6 group homes who can house up to 6 children each and these are for more permanent placement. Each group home has a group home parent who takes care of all the children living in their home. They function as much like a normal home as possible. The children get up, have breakfast, all go to school in the community, come home or play sports after school. We have homework helpers who come to tutor the kids then they eat dinner in their homes as a family, do chores and then go to bed. We travel to 17 different schools in the morning by the vans we have donated. Our children come from Miami-14%, Palm Beach-42%, Broward 44%. If a child who comes to live at the village is doing well in their school, we do everything we can to keep them there and keep that connection. These kids lose everything when they are taken out of their homes that if we can keep anything familiar with them, we will and we do.
The reason the group homes are more permanent is because no one really wants to foster or adopt an older child who has already been from foster home to foster home and who has some major issues because of all the rejection in their life. Honestly, most of them do not want to go into another home. So we take care of these children like our own, we send them to college, help them get jobs, celebrate their birthdays. We do anything and everything to let them know this is their home and they can live here and be taken care of no matter what.
We also send our children to college that are able to go. Last year one of our teens got a scholarship to Florida State which was a huge success for him and for us as an agency. When we send a child to college we have to furnish their dorm just like every parent would do and when they come home for break, they come home to the JAFCO village. We hope all of our children are able to go to college and succeed in life just like we would for our own children.
We also have an independent living program which at the age of 16 we teach the children how to one day live on their own so when they turn 21, they are able to manage independently. If these kids are here till they are 21, it’s because they have no one else in the community to turn to and JAFCO will never stop helping our children if need be.
We have a family preservation program where we support about 250 children and we are successful in this program 80% of the time. In this program we go in and help the family as a whole so the child doesn’t have to be taken out of the home because studies say that the trauma of taking a child out of their home is sometimes worse than what is going on in the home. So we go in and give the family services so they can hopefully stay together and be safe. We give therapy, if a parent needs to go to rehab we help them with that, if a family has 4 children and they are suffering financially and the husband dies, we help to get daycare for the mom so she can work, we give parenting classes, help with anger management classes, things of this sort. We do not go into the home and give the family a check and say good luck. We really train these families how to live together safely.
We have a senior care giving program. A lot of grandparents are taking care of their grandchildren and we go in and help them to do so with a lot of the same things as we give to our families in our preservation program.
We have our foster program where we recruit, license and monitor our own foster families.
We have our adoptive program where we recruit, license and monitor our own adoptive families.
We are currently taking care of 350 children and to date have saved over 2,000 lives. Our annual budget is 4.5 million dollars to run all of our programs. Due to the lack of state funding to protect children, JAFCO is forced to raise over 80% of our annual $4.5 million dollar budget through private donations. Ninety-one cents out of every dollar goes directly to the children.
JAFCO was brought about because of the lack of social services in the Jewish community. Our main goal has become to place these children in culturally appropriate homes because we found it helps with the healing process. When these kids are taken out of their homes they lose everything, their family, their stuffed animals, their beds, everything, so if we can keep their roots and traditions with them it’s one thing they can always stay connected to. JAFCO believes that every child deserves a safe and loving home.
Keywords: South Florida jewish adoption, foster care, abused children,
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