Paulding County Today TV media production coordinator Jody Martin and Videographer Jeff Harkins recently produced a video spot regarding outreach efforts for Paulding’s Foster Parent program that’s proving a very useful tool toward bridging the gap that exists in foster care.
Relative to other surrounding counties, Paulding County has its share of children in need of foster care without nearly enough local homes to support them.
Among other things the video is being used nationwide in Foster Care Training, Martin said.
The video spot recently got 10,000 views in less than a week on Facebook, and Paulding Detective Lenny Carr contacted Martin to let her know that he’s using the video in presentations on a national level, such as an Internet Crimes Against Children conference.
Featured in the video spot, which runs about two minutes, adopted former foster child and spokesperson Hannah Daffron and Foster Care President Shelley Martin help to make the case for foster care. “They both did so great, I knew it was going to be good,” Harkins said.
Hannah and Ms. Martin also visited the Paulding Commissioner’s morning session recently to recognize May as National Foster Care Month.
Currently 162 children are in the program and severed from any family environment, with not enough homes for them to go to. About 26 homes are involved, but it would take closer to 100 to keep pace, according to Linda Verscharen, executive director, Family Alliance of Paulding. Ms. Verscharen together with Hiram City Council’s Kathy Carter helped to get the video spot created.
“We supervise the visits between foster children and their parents until they go back home, or they’re adopted. So we supervise about 90 to 100 hours a week and last year we transported over 25,000 miles to place these kids to meet with their parents. We have more children [now] than we’ve had in the last 15 years,” Verscharen said, and added that the local problem reflects the problem nationwide. “There aren’t enough PSAs or videos that talk about foster care or child abuse – those are mostly things that people don’t want to talk about,” Verscharen said. But she feels this video will help efforts to educate the community.
“Foster care is more than just children who are in DFACS, it’s all about the child and a family; you have to think about them as individuals, not just the foster care system. So we’re working on rebranding that, and that’s what this video is going to help us do,” she said. Hiram City Council’s Kathy Carter is working recruitment with DFACS, and considers the video spot an important tool for recruitment. Ms. Carter characterizes the current situation as “an epic crisis” and current efforts have been unable to keep pace with the number of children coming into care both locally and statewide, she said. “We don’t have a recruitment budget so we appeal to the county. I just did a county-wide conference in Douglasville and I showed the video, and I show it everywhere I go,” Carter said.
Carter does recruitment for Region 3, which includes Paulding, Polk, Bartow, Harrelson and Douglas counties. She has background for this sort of thing from a career in social work and worked in Palm Beach, Florida as executive director to open the first shelter for babies with AIDS, which overwhelmed the foster care system there, she said. The Georgia Department of Human Resources also adopted the video spot, according to Carter, and it’s being used on a statewide basis to train new foster families and new trainers. Carter recently spoke to Paulding Commissioners during their morning session to thank them for their support through the production of the video spot. “We’re gaining but we still need so many more so can keep our children in their county, so they can go to the school they’re in, go to the churches they’re in, stay with their siblings. Many times the school and/or church are a sacred-haven for children, and when we remove them from them, we just keep compounding the problem,” she said.
And Verscharen says she’d like to see some outreach done to local churches as well.
“If there were volunteers who can’t be foster parents themselves, but would like to help with outreach, and could spend some time speaking with local churches about sponsoring even one child – if every church in the county would commit to finding one foster family and support them in their efforts so they wouldn’t feel alone, we would have enough to go around,” she said.
As for their Foster Care video spot, Harkins and Martin like it when the work they do can have such a positive impact, they said. “The thing is if we can help just one child find their foster home -- that’s why we like to do this,” Harkins said.

Paulding County Today TV media production coordinator Jody Martin and Videographer Jeff Harkins recently produced video spot for Paulding’s Foster Parent program is proving an effective dissemination tool on local, state and even national levels. (Photo: R. Grant)