The East Tennessee foster care system is overburdened. There are significantly more children entering care and in need of foster families than are available. This forces children, primarily teenagers, to sit in limbo after being removed from their homes, often for several days, waiting for a host home to become available to them. What happens to those children while they wait? Where do they go?

Unfortunately, the current solution is for children to go to the county Department of Child Services (DCS) office. There, they will wait for the next host home to open, spending the night under the supervision of DCS employees. This means that any given night, there may be one or two children, as many as eight, sleeping at the sterile Knox County DCS office, a reality we see repeated at all of the Greater Knoxville-area DCS offices.

This year, Fostering Hope (FH) is stepping in to make this experience significantly less traumatic by creating a support network around the Knox DCS office and children newly entering foster care. Their mission is that every child entering the foster care system feels valued and hopeful for their future, and that begins the moment they enter the system, even if that first night (or three) is at the Knox DCS office.