At Life.Church, we know our community won’t be changed by programs alone. What really makes the difference is trusted, ongoing relationships among the people in the community. That’s why our local mission work is focused on partnering with local organizations to help build and support relationships that inspire change. We help connect individuals, families and small groups to carefully selected local partner organizations that offer opportunities for volunteers to become involved in the lives of those they’re serving.
Our local partners address various community needs, such as community development, education, recovery and transitional living, food, clothing and shelter. One of our big focus areas at Life.Church is supporting adoption and foster care families. With the help of our partners, we hope to ensure every family in crisis feels supported and every child has a family they can thrive in.
We’ve highlighted a few of our local mission partners and encourage people to connect with them to find out how to better support all types of families—biological, foster and adoptive.
Angels Foster Family Network
129 Ed Noble Parkway, Norman
531.0352
What They Do
Angels Foster Family Network is a local nonprofit foster care agency whose mission is to rescue abused, abandoned and neglected children, match them with a select group of trained foster parents and ensure the maximum emotional, social and intellectual development of each child. The goal is to develop deep community involvement, volunteerism and cultivate the best foster homes available for infants, toddlers and children. Angels prides itself on relationships from foster parent to child, caseworker to parent, and all of the people in-between. Angels works to create the very best support for families and children.
How You Can Help
Angels Foster Family Network offers many ways to serve. Volunteers can babysit foster children in the playroom while foster parents attend trainings, or they can be paired with foster families to provide in-home childcare. Donation Coordinators organize donation drives and help sort items. During foster events, volunteers can help engage the kids and involve the parents in activities. For benefit events, volunteers are needed to help with registration, check-out, and silent and live auctions. Volunteers are also needed to fill immediate needs for families whose foster children are in the hospital, prepare and deliver meals to foster families in need, and help collect, wrap and deliver Christmas gifts to foster families.
Stand in the Gap Ministries
1601 North Blackwelder, Oklahoma City
LifeLaunch@sitgm.org
What They Do
For young adults in foster care, Stand in the Gap created the Life Launch program. These young adults, ages 16-24, have experienced trauma and lack safe adult relationships outside of the DHS system. Through partnerships with local ministries and organizations that meet the clinical needs of these young adults, Life Launch is able to provide teams of two to four mentors from the local church to meet the basic relational needs of these young adults. Over the course of a year, mentor teams spend three to eight hours per month with their mentee building trust and working collaboratively toward goals.
How You Can Help
We are looking for mentors who are age 21 or older and members of the local church community. After attending a trauma-informed training and passing a background check, mentors are matched into teams, giving the opportunity for small groups and married couples to serve together. Teams schedule their monthly time together based on their schedules and availability. Additionally, teams are asked to check in weekly with their young adult to continue building trust and relational equity. The first step to becoming a mentor is to attend a training on the second Monday of every month.
111Project
210.2075
What They Do
111Project’s goal is to mobilize the local church to support and advocate for families in crisis and ensure that every child has a family. Organizers believe that in order to do that, the church and state have to work together. The goal is to bridge the gap between resources and opportunities by equipping churches to engage directly with the issue of foster care and meeting the physical and emotional needs of families in crisis through a tool called CarePortal. Cleveland County has over 300 kids in out-of-home care right now and 86% of its churches active on CarePortal. But there’s still a need for more churches to recruit and support foster families and more volunteers to help case workers and families in crisis.
How You Can Help
By becoming active through CarePortal, you have access to the current needs in your county and the ability to immediately respond. You're able to mobilize your church to meet physical needs for children and families by providing clothing, beds or bus passes for biological parents as they work toward reunification. You can activate volunteers from your congregation to support your local DHS by lending a hand with paperwork or riding along with a caseworker who is traveling with three kids. Volunteers can emotionally invest in families in crisis by coming alongside them as they work to put their family back together. Your church can recruit and support foster families so that the children in your county have foster families waiting on them instead of them waiting on a family.
Jon Mays is central team leader for Local Mission Partnerships.
