A Family For Every Child, a nonprofit organization, was started by Christy Obie-Barrett and dozens of dedicated and passionate volunteers. In 2006, AFFEC was formed and developed into an organization focused on finding permanent and loving adoptive homes for all waiting children. Our intention is to develop programs that assist special-needs/challenging-to-place foster children in finding their ow
n Forever Families. We started with our first sole project called The Heart Gallery in November, 2006, and now we have blossomed into ten incredibly successful programs. None of this could have occurred without the wonderful support from this community’s sources, including volunteers, sponsors, photographers, in-kind donors and many more. Heart Gallery Mission
"The mission of Heart Gallery of America ® Inc. is to facilitate and utilize the power of photography to capture the individuality and dignity of children living in foster care, in order to advocate for their permanency, raise public awareness about their needs, and obtain support to help meet those needs. An integral part of honoring this mission is to provide assistance and resources to Heart Gallery chapters nationwide to help them achieve parallel goals for the waiting children they represent." Facts & Figures:
*430,000 children in foster care in the United States
*10,000 children in the State of Oregon
*1,000 children in foster care in Lane County
THE FUTURE
All of our existing programs will continue throughout 2012. One of our primary focuses of the upcoming year is the “aging-out” group of teens. These are children ten years old and older who are at risk of “aging out” of the foster care system. Statistics tell us that only half of these youths will graduate from high school, and fewer than three percent will graduate from college. Finding permanent parents for teens before they exit foster care, no matter what their age, is the single greatest positive youth-development program. The greatest need in the adoption field is to do special recruitment, retention and support for adoption of children ages ten and older. Our focus will be lifetime-committed parents, adoption and teen-permanency programs, which will include Family Finding, ten-and-older adoptions and mentoring. We hope to continue to have your involvement and support in the future, as it is evident through our successful programs that we ARE making a difference. We could never be doing such incredible work without you and the support of the very generous community.
