For the past couple of years, a heartwarming tradition has graced the Monday of Thanksgiving week for our 1HOPE community. Thanks to the generosity of our dedicated partner, Valcor Commercial Real Estate, Urban Air at North Park opened its doors exclusively for our families. In this exclusive three-hour experience, over 100 adults and children enjoyed a morning filled with laughter, adventure, and cherished memories.

Giving Tuesday follows the post-Thanksgiving Christmas shopping spree that starts with Black Friday. Most non-profits run a campaign on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving to kick off their end-of-year giving. Each year 1HOPE uses Giving Tuesday to focus on our sister organization, The New Braunfels Foster Closet.

Foster care can be a great unknown for the church. After all, when was the last time any of us heard a sermon on foster care or adoption? When dealing with the state, there can be a lot of inaccurate assumptions and fears. We are here to help to navigate between myth and reality with foster care!

Advent is coming. Get your heart prepared with these devotionals.

Our foster families go through enough as it is and shouldn’t have to weed through their feed to find something worthy of their attention. Here are nine social media accounts every foster mom (and dad) should follow.

Foster care has a lingo. Here is your cheat sheet for the most common and confusing terms you might encounter in foster care.

Respite care is about stability, both for the foster parent and the child. It helps prevent burnout and recharges you so you can get back to it.

Parenting is hard. There is nothing like having to care for a tiny human with no impulse control. It is not uncommon for parents to sometimes feel like they are in too deep. How can you keep your head above water? Here are six tools or resources to help you keep going when overwhelmed with fostering children.

Trust-Based Relational Intervention®, or TBRI, is an advanced intervention process “designed to meet the complex needs of vulnerable children.” It is a tool developed by Karyn Purvis and David Cross at Texas Christian University and focuses on caring for “children from hard places.”

Fostering is always temporary. The primary goal is permanence. The first strategy is to reunify a child with their parents, or with extended family if the parents are not an option. If that is not possible then other forms of permanency are needed, such as adoption.