Transformations By Olympic Angels

We believe that for foster care to work, we have to design the system of care around the needs of the child. Children in the court dependency system are wards of the state - literally society’s children - and should be treasured for who they are and the potential they hold. Here on the Olympic Peninsula, we’ve decided we can do much, much better, simply by placing community volunteers in support of families and making sure each child has at least one healthy, consistent adult relationship in addition to their foster parents. We have repeatedly found that while not everyone is called to foster, most anyone can make a difference in the life of a child in care.

Our vision is that every young person in foster care has healthy, affirming, and lasting adult relationships within their community. We know from the literature and simple human experience that this is the single most critical building block to healthy development.

To provide families with exceptional support, we first have to provide our volunteers with the training, guidance, and peer network they need to be successful, as they are the people providing frontline care. Somewhat counterintuitively, our goal over the next three years is not directly focused on the number of children served or changes in their trajectory, but on the number of volunteers we successfully put into front line service, as they are the foundation of successful outcomes:

By the end of 2023, Olympic Angels will empower 400 program volunteers to serve children in foster care and the families that support them.

Imperatives in 2021:
These strategies imply certain “must reach” milestones in the coming year, accomplishments that are critical to continued growth and impact. These include:
A fully functional system for data collection and analysis to substantiate impact and provide direction for continuous improvement of the volunteer experience.
A comprehensive three-year funding plan and accompanying donor pipeline.
A diversified governing board, more reflective of Clallam County and of the populations we serve that are disproportionately represented in the foster system (Native, POC, and current or former LGBTQ+ youth).
A Clallam County launch plan and priorities for outreach, followed by active partnership development and preparations for launching community-level programming. Partnership development with Peninsula tribes will be a top priority.

Our three strategies are intended to be both distinct, but also highly intertwined:

Strategy 1: Provide the framework that allows the broader Peninsula community to organize around improving the foster system.

Well-trained volunteers providing whole-family care fundamentally change the underlying dynamics of foster care by bringing stability, attention, human kindness, and love to families that can often be overwhelmed and isolated. With a community-supported framework in place, suddenly a host of available resources can be activated, because there is a broader base of people with the time available to do things like fill out applications, track down the right people, or provide respite care to overburdened foster parents.

No one would disagree that the foster system needs improvements at every level. In time, as more and more people understand how the system of care can be rewired with children’s best interests in mind, we believe our volunteers and partners are capable of becoming a collective force for positive change.

Strategy 2: Focus on the volunteer as the core client, with highly personalized support at every stage.

The Angels model is effective and efficient for one simple reason - ordinary people from all walks of life show up to do the work as volunteers. Our responsibility as an organization is to make sure their experience is as real, fulfilling, and purposeful as we possibly can. Foster care is anything but easy, so we ensure volunteers are well-trained and informed, have a strong peer network of support, and are matched with families where they stand the best chance of doing the best.

At the heart of good service to volunteers is an individualized understanding of their needs and motivations. National Angels provides a proven framework for our case managers to understand, document, and take action relative to these needs and motivations through a consultative process. Foster families and children in care receive a parallel intake process, and it is through this depth of information that successful matches are made. This case management capacity is ultimately the core competency of Angels, directly tied to our ability to scale: the organization empowers case managers to empower volunteers to empower foster families to empower children.

Strategy 3: Consistently message a new foster narrative: shifting from stigma and isolation to joy and collective purpose.

One of the greatest gifts that National Angels has provided us here on the Peninsula is an ethos of hope. Foster care often occurs out of public view, but by bringing it into the open and offering concrete ways of helping, we believe that almost anyone can rise up to do something to improve life for these children, particularly if such opportunities are easy to access, matched to volunteers’ availability and lifestyle, and consistently rewarding.

By the end of 2023, Olympic Angels will empower 400 program volunteers to serve children in foster care and the families that support them.

To date, we have recruited 197 volunteers and have mapped the annual goals and related capacities and costs needed to reach 400. While the number of volunteers is an indicator of our capacity, it is the quality of their experience that dictates the depth and duration of their involvement. For this reason, we focus on survey-driven feedback and continuous quality improvement at every stage - recruitment, vetting, training, matching, supporting, retaining, celebrating, and even offboarding.

Thus far Olympic Angels volunteers have served over 55 children, even staying connected when children are moved out of our area. In 2020, total case management expenses were $21,684 to initiate and support foster families and mentees. This returned $193,216 in volunteer time, in-kind donations, and miles driven on behalf of the families and mentees, a nearly 9x return on investment