IMPACT
Helping Parents Navigate a Complex System
Project IMPACT (Interventions to Maintain Parents and Children Together) works with parents who have lost their children to foster care, helping them to create safe and loving homes and achieve fast, permanent reunifications.
Parents whose children have been placed in foster care are often going through family and personal crises that may have led to or contributed to the removal of their children. They may be dealing with drug addiction, mental illness, unemployment, poverty, and domestic violence. Most parents are consumed with feelings of anger, in deep denial about their problems, confused about their rights, and harbor distrust and resentment towards the foster care agencies that took their children away.
To regain custody of their children and prevent them from growing up in foster care, parents need to gain the motivation and awareness to address their problems and learn to negotiate a system that has deemed them unfit for parenthood. They must find their way through a complex system that often fails to provide the support that will help families reunite.
Project IMPACT has four primary initiatives to assist these families: Parent Skills Classes and Workshops, Parent Support Groups and Family Work, Parent Advocacy, and the Parent Council.
The program has the following goals:
- Help birth parents access services and assistance so they can overcome their personal problems surrounding abuse, neglect, and delinquency
- Assist parents in dealing with the anger, guilt, and trauma that results from having their children taken away
- Encourage parents to advocate for their interests and understand their rights
- Create a network of parents who can share experiences and offer each other support
- Forge a positive partnership between birth parents and CV staff.
