WE BELIEVE
THE YOUTH OF CENTRAL TEXAS
deserve a family IN THEIR TIME OF CRISIS.
With the community’s support,
youth can thrive on their journey
to a loving home.
We can transform the way
we think about foster care.
Our goals…
Improve the healing and overall well-being of children in foster care.
Reduce the average number of placements foster children experience prior to permanency.
Safely reduce the average time to achieve positive permanency.
Create a trauma-informed culture which values and achieves positive permanency.
Foster Community is born out of the Travis County Collaborative for Children (TCCC), a bold and ambitious initiative catalyzed by the Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development at Texas Christian University. The TCCC works to bring system-wide change to the way foster children in Travis County are cared for during, and after, their time in state custody.
Mission Capital serves as the backbone support for the Travis County Collaborative for Children and its foster family and volunteer recruitment initiative, Foster Community. We are partnering with the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, St. David’s Foundation, and a network of dedicated partner organizations, to change the way we think about foster care and how we develop solutions.
Meet our
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT SPECIALIST
Ana Acosta
Community Engagement Specialist
“My main role as a community engagement specialist is to match your availability with our opportunities and empower you to support our community’s children in foster care.”
Before launching Foster Community, Ana was a teacher in high needs schools where she had the privilege of working with children in the foster care system. Her students helped her gain a thorough understanding of the challenges faced by kids in care and after 16 years of teaching, she finally heeded a calling to shift her energies to support children in the foster care system.
She quickly learned that the hardships these children experience are exacerbated by the crisis-level shortage of foster families. Each year, hundreds of kids are forced to sleep in government offices, hotels, psychiatric hospitals or shelters because there aren’t enough families available. Although not everyone is ready to become a foster parent, everyone can support children and families in the child welfare system and Ana is ready to help you find the way that’s right for you.
The challenges in the foster care system are too complex to be tackled by a single government agency or nonprofit organization. The key to a better foster care system is an engaged and collaborative community and Foster Community is working with individuals and partner organizations to make this vision a reality.
