Indianapolis, 2017 – Bethany Christian Services in Indianapolis was recently awarded a $200,000 grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust to assist in furthering foster care efforts in Marion County. Currently, the United States is in the midst of a foster care crisis and a grant such as this will play an important role in recruiting caring families for vulnerable children.

Bethany, a global nonprofit organization committed to bringing and keeping families together, applied for the grant on June 1, 2016. The Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust seeks to help people in need, especially women, children and families, and had identified foster care as being a priority.

“We desperately need foster families for children in Marion County,” said Linda Wrestler, branch director of Bethany’s Indianapolis office. “We receive about 40 to 50 referrals per week for children needing foster families and we are going to work extremely hard with this grant to fill the need.”

The recent uptick in the need for foster families stems from the heroin epidemic sweeping across Indianapolis. Because of the widespread issue, Child Protective Services has been removing children of all ages, including newborns, from their parents. This has resulted in a serious need for foster families and the grant will help raise awareness for this cause in hopes of recruiting loving families to open their hearts and homes to children in crisis.

The grant will be divided over two years, with $100,000 being allocated for each year. Bethany is currently in search of a candidate to fill a foster family recruiter position, a new position that is available because of the grant. The goal is to utilize this position to work primarily with churches to identify and recruit new foster families.

“Because Bethany has a connection with churches through everything we do, this seemed to be a logical place to start searching for families to help with the foster care crisis,” said Wrestler. “We hope that success in this area will spur our efforts to spread throughout the community as a whole.”

Bethany has set the goal of attaining an additional 50 foster families in its first year.

To learn more about foster care or other services through Bethany in Indianapolis, please visit www.bethany.org/indianapolis.

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