Delaware Co. not-for-profit to intercept kids between removal day, foster care
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Hannah Coffman and her husband have fostered more than 20 children over seven years, but it grew to not be feasible with her young family of six. The weight of walking away grew heavy.
She said she had a plan to intercept the children who fall between the crack of the Indiana Department of Child Services’ removal and a foster home placement. That plan replaces the typical scenario where kids idle in an office cubicle, entertained with a printed-off coloring sheet or a small bucket of toys for as long as it takes a case worker to find a new home.
“Once you get involved with the system, you realize how heavy it is and how many issues there are,” she said. “It’s not something you can just walk away from.”
Coffman will soon be opening an Isaiah 117 House in Delaware County. The house serves as a space where DCS can take kids removed from an unsafe home environment while they wait a few hours to a couple of days for a foster family.
The county has signaled its full support with a land donation and $200,000 to build the house.
“It touched my heart being a law enforcement officer. I go into the homes where they remove the children from.” Commissioner James King said. “It was a no-brainer for me. We had to help them.”
Commissioner James King talks about how he learned about Isaiah 117 House and his reaction.
The two-bedroom home will seek to provide a safe space for kids coming from a lack of such, Coffman said. The child will walk into a house with a room full of new clothes to choose from, a bed and a volunteer ready to make the child as comfortable and safe as possible. It will have a full kitchen and a backyard. Volunteers can also help with tasks like treating lice.
“If a kid comes in at 3 a.m., and they are up and running ready to go, and they want to bake cookies, our volunteers are going to bake cookies with a smile on their face,” Coffman said. “We are there to serve the child and make their day less traumatic.”
Reducing a child’s trauma is at the forefront, but another goal is also to find the best foster placement, not just the first one. Coffman said they want to reduce case workers’ workloads by providing support and child care, so they can effectively do their jobs.
Hannah Coffman talks about mitigating the trauma of a child’s removal day.
Another service the Isaiah 117 House provides is holding a child and helping a family prepare to take them in. Often, when a foster family or family member is notified of a child to take in, they receive a five-minute phone call and a child is on their doorstep within the hour.
Coffman said they also will take a child in to give a family or foster an extra hour or two to prepare. Not only will the family be more ready, but Coffman said Isaiah 117 House will help with coordinating resources like finding supplies or building a crib.
“With the Isaiah house, the caseworkers will be able to find that best yes from the beginning,” she said.
The average visit to one of these homes is about nine hours, she said. With an average of 135 kids in foster care at any time in the county, Coffman said they anticipate a similar demand as the Isaiah 117 House in Indianapolis, which saw 20 to 25 kids in the first month.
King said he wants to see more counties adopt this not-for-profit, so they too can protect children and minimize their trauma. He said it’s places like Isaiah 117 House where they can address the mental health of these children and set them on a better track to not fall into the vices and behaviors their upbringings have surrounded them with.
“This is somewhere where we can remove these kids from that situation. We can put them in a safe place, where they can see that people are there, that we do want to help them. We just don’t want to leave them in the situation that they’re stuck in,” King said. “And we are going to put funding toward places like Isaiah’s House to help these children.”
A Tennesee couple founded the larger not-for-profit in 2018 after learning at a foster care training that a little girl had slept on a conference room floor since she didn’t yet have a placement. Now, Isaiah 117 House has opened 22 homes in 12 states with 50 more in the pipeline.
In Indiana, four houses are currently open serving Boone, Montgomery, Hendricks, Marion, Knox and Vanderburgh counties, according to its website. Another four are in the works in Delaware, Tippecanoe, Putnam, Spencer and Perry counties.
Stakeholders hope the Delaware County house will be ready by the end of 2024. A recent event brought out a few dozen contractors and locals eager to help with the project. As of this week, Coffman said they are just waiting on permits before breaking ground.
Coffman will work full-time at the house as the location leader. She will later hire two part-time roles: a support coordinator and a volunteer coordinator. The rest of the support staff will be volunteers on call to respond when a kid is en route to the home.
As for future operational costs and funding, King said they can request it from the county. As long as he is commissioner, he said he will always try to fund projects like this one.
“It’s something that we’ve needed for a very, very long time,” he said. “So I would support it 100% anytime and every time they would need me.”