Our Old Process
Fostering Memories has traditionally visited a single foster care residential treatment center and, depending upon the size, taken photos of all available kids within the facility or of a particular segment of the population. Once the photos were processed, we then returned to the facility to hand out photos and create scrapbooks. This is still an option for larger facilities, but can be more challenging for smaller foster care centers. If a facility only houses six kids, and two are out of the facility during your visit, you have more volunteers than children. Plus we almost never have the exact same population for both visits – so you have kids creating scrapbooks with no photos and other kids who receive their photos but can’t come to the event where they put together their scrapbooks.
Improvements
So Laurie suggested that we try to make it a single event where we take the photos, process them and then make scrapbooks. For small group homes, we can combine several small group homes for a single event – this would help more youth in a single day and make maximum use of our volunteers. Plus it would give the kids an opportunity to visit a different venue and the immediate gratification of seeing the photos that day. Of course, we need an appropriate facility that gives us great photo backgrounds combined with space to put together scrapbooks. And we need portable printers, of suitable quality, to immediately print photos.
Testing the New Process at Mission Trails Regional Park
Our latest success was our first attempt at this new process – we invited 65 foster youth who reside in small group homes to the beautiful Mission Trails Regional Park. What a beautiful setting and a fun day for all! Group home staff, volunteers and – most importantly – kids raved about how meaningful this was.
We found some wonderful printers that provide great quality photos. They print slowly, so we’ve purchased several and are figuring out ways – using multiple camera cards,. multiple photographers and volunteer runners who move the cards between the printers and the photographers – to efficiently use our resources to provide the maximum number of photos for each child.
So far so good!
