The Child & Family Service's Transitional Family Homes program on Hawaiʻi Island is looking for a handful more families to become "therapeutic foster parents" for children and teens in need.
Rebekah Mraz, the director of West Hawai‘i Programs, talked to The Conversation about how transitional housing differs from general foster care.
"Our foster parents are trained as professional parents. They're licensed just through the same state standards, but we give them much more training and oversight, and far fewer children. We will only put two children into each transitional family home," Mraz said.
The program aims to place a child in a transitional home for about nine to 12 months and then return them to their biological family. Finding foster families in the same communities as the young person also ensures some level of stability.
"We really are authorized to place in about 10 beds, 10 youths at a time. Right now, I only have about capacity to do half that amount, so I'm probably looking for four foster families to start up new, perhaps two on both sides of the Big Island. And that would help bring us back up to capacity," Mraz told HPR.
CFS has an online informational session for prospective foster families on May 16. Click here to register.
"This makes such a difference in a young person's life to overcome things that they're struggling with, that their biological families are struggling with, and to successfully come out on the other side."
This interview aired on The Conversation on May 13, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
