Getting involved in the foster care system
Many children and teens in Yuma county and all over our country are without a loving home. May is national foster care month. All week long we have featured different stories that highlight the need for foster families in Yuma County and personal stories from those that have gone through the foster care system. Today is the last part in our series, “Found Families.” We focus on how you can help.
“I oversee the foster care and adoption programs,” Cori Rico, Program Director of Foster Care, ICPC and Adoption at the Arizona’s Children Association.
Rico works with relative families and community families.
“Those are families that are coming in that really want to open up their heart and home to kids in need and we work with families that are interested in adoption whether that be through the foster care system or through private adoption,” she said.
She also helps those who may want to adopt an international child.
“Adoption is forever and it is literally the birth certificate changes to where as if the adoptive parents were at the hospital and gave birth to that child,” Rico said.
Whether you are interested in adopting a child or fostering, the process is similar.
“You have to be 21, there are background checks, you have to have a fingerprint card, and we do references, we do interviews with the immediate family that’s in the home,” she explained.
They look at desire, motivation, expectation and the reality of it and see how that all works together.
“There is training that’s required and so the actual requirements are the same across the board, whether you’re a relative family or a community family,” she said.
The mandatory classes take a little over one month to complete which consist of five in-person classes and some online courses.
“They really do a great job of talking about the needs of the children, what trauma can look like in these foster children and what that results in in behaviors that you may see with these children coming in and they talk about the child welfare system and we talk about expectations,” she said.
In addition to classes, there are home inspections and collection of financial records. This can make the entire process before becoming a certified adoption family, three months.
“We also have a lot of families in Yuma that they might have relatives in Winterhaven or Imperial County and they might come into the system and they’ll call me and say hey Cori I want my relative and they live in California but it’s five minutes away to them, there are a lot of different rules across state lines,” she said.
You must get licensed in the state in which you currently live, but once you are a licensed foster parent, due to the demand, they will match you with a child or teen immediately.
If you are interested in becoming a foster parent or would like to adopt contact Arizona’s Children Association.
