On September 24th our speaker was Jill Stoddard, ED of the Family and Children Services (F&CS) Foundation. She was joined by 2 board members Tara and Steve along with our own Ami Tsarfati who also serves on the F&CS Board.
The F&CS Foundation is a completely separate organization than the F&CS Agency. The Foundation's mandate is focussed long term on prevention in comparison to the Agency's short term mandate of child protection.
As part of the LT preventions strategy the Foundation needs to address the root causes of child maltreatment including:
- Barriers to service
- Social isolation (especially relevant during the pandemic)
- Poverty
- Racism
- Intergenerational trauma-history repeats itself in a vicious cycle
Unfortunately government funding is not often available to LT preventative measures, frankly because it doesn’t help win elections.
The Foundations 4 pillars of support:
- Building Resilience-programs to enable people to work thru adversity and thrive
- Poverty Mitigation-provide emergency support and counselling after traumatic events
- Equity in Philanthropy-funding and other support for diverse causes tackling root cause issues within our community
- Social Innovation-identify gaps in service and fill them with new programs while also improving existing programs. Additional initiative to package and sell developed content to other communities.
The Foundation's budget is over $1.5M with almost half provided by grants. Sadly this important organization often gets overlooked by funders as it is confused with the Agency and funders incorrectly assume that it receives government funding.
For further information on the F&CS Foundation, refer to their website at https://www.facswaterloo.org/foundation