Children's Aid Society seeking diverse foster families

With Windsor's Children's Aid Society reporting its number of foster families are at an all time low, it's reaching out to the city's cultural communities for help.

There are 1,502 active files and 502 children in care in our region, but there are only 196 foster homes. That's 50 homes below average.

"Sometimes people feel that it has to be a two-parent family to foster, that same-sex couples wouldn't be approved, people from different cultures feel less comfortable coming forward," said Dawn Marie Rocheleau the foster parent recruiter at Children's Aid.

"We're letting people know that we look individually at what each family is able to offer to us and how that's going to meet the needs of the children we have coming into our care," she said.

She said beliefs around the paperwork and steps required to become a foster parent often discourage people from signing up.

Sushil Jain, the president of Windsor's South Asian Centre said he hears similar concerns from the people he knows in his community.

"The impression with many in our community is of an overzealous Children's Aid Societies," Jain said. "There's a lot of documentation required, training required, so they think it becomes much more of an onerous job … there is too much structure, too much paperwork."

Within the South Asian community, many foster families are informal, Jain said.

One family living in Windsor, but originally from Rwanda has several foster children. Laurent and Claudine Kayumba have fostered seven children, in addition to four children of their own.

After their experiences during the Rwandan genocide, they saw many children without families. They took in their first child after coming to Canada in 1998. She was a Rwandan girl living in California who was at risk of being sent back to Rwanda.

After much soul-searching, Laurent and Claudine decided to give her a place to stay.

"It's the greatest thing to make a difference in somebody's life, for some of us it's a way of paying back to those who made a difference in our lives," Laurent Kayumba explained. "The best way to do it is to do it when they're young. They need guidance, somebody to love them, to tell them this is the way to go."

The Children's Aid Society will host its next foster and adoption information session on August 23.