THE NEED FOR A DREAM:
Ultimately, DREAM's goal is to build a campus that encompasses all levels of foster care. DREAM realizes that the immediate need of the child is to be reunified with their family as soon as possible, providing their parents and or relatives can adequately provide for them. If this is not possible the next best option is to find a loving home for adoption. Sometimes neither scenario takes place, leaving the potential for a child to flounder in our foster care system bouncing from temporary home to temporary home. In partnership, DREAM wants to insure that every child in San Luis Obispo County, and ultimately this country, be given the opportunity to live in one stable and loving environment and that not one child remain lost in the system. The first phase of our DREAM is the acquisition of land and the constructing of a Level 14 group home.
Level 14 group homes provide a higher level of care to those children whose special circumstances indicate a need for a degree of greater supervision and structure than can be provided by foster home families. Level 14 children vary in age and needs.
Our DREAM is to build a home that will not only meet the immediate needs of these children, but will provide them the means to step down from Level 14, allowing for a transition back into the public school system. A level 14 home in our County will offer a stable environment, and will allow the child's family, many of which do not have the ability to travel, an opportunity to work towards reunification, through visitation on a regular basis.
No child should be expected to go out into the world without having been taught that love and trust are attainable and that there are people to fall back on should life become unbearable. All children deserve to have memories and records about their life. The children deserve a system that insures that their rights are protected and that the changes that are brought upon them by the adults around them are indeed in "the best interest of the child".
As quoted from the Bill of Rights for Foster Children, " Even more than for other children, society has a responsibility along with parents for the well-being of foster children. Citizens are responsible for acting to insure their welfare."
