A family resource

Kim and Shawn Long, of Waynesboro, did not know Stephen Young until the Internet brought them to work together.

Young is a foster and adoptive family development recruiter with Shenandoah Valley Social Services in Verona, which covers Waynesboro, Augusta County and Staunton, who wanted to bring more public awareness to the children in the local Virginia foster care system and through his office’s new website, Resource Family, the Longs found him.

“We’ve had about 140 unique page views that looked at the application page since we went live,” he said.

Kim Long, a school counselor at Walton Middle School in Albemarle County, was one of those 140. She was interested in obtaining information on fostering and adoptions.

“I used the city of Waynesboro’s website and found the Resource Family website,” she said.

The Longs viewed videos and information regarding fostering and adoption on the website and were able to begin the process.

“The Longs were the first people to actually go through as far as they could on the site, without any human interaction, to initiate the process,” Young said, which included preliminary paperwork because the actual application is long.

“I mention that on the site, so people are aware,” said Young, who maintains the site, which is similar to FACES of Virginia Families than being associated with SVSS.

The balance of the application packet, including criminal, financial and health checks, can be picked up from Young and his staff at the office.

“The paperwork is really, really intense,” said Long. “But I was glad to see they really check out the people who want to get involved.”

Long has already been involved with children for years in her job, kids from many different backgrounds and situations. Plus she was a teacher before becoming a counselor.

“We don’t have any of our own kids right now,” Long said.

At Walton M.S., Long said they try to promote family environments and that she and her husband also wanted to do the same.

“His concern was that he wouldn’t be able to return a child when or if it became time to reunite them with their family,” she said. So she got him involved in Walton’s mentoring program.

“Now he sees that he can work with children helping them and teaching them, and then let them move on,” she said.

Besides videos, the Resource Family site includes questions and answers, information on each step of the process, newsletters dating back to 2009 and a way for people to donate to the program.

“I’ve been trying to get this done for some time,” Young said. “Since we work through local agencies, we tried to go through the county first because their site didn’t offer much. I wanted to increase awareness and provide information on how to apply.”

It was through Young’s community speaking engagements that he finally found someone who offered to help.

“I met [a representative] of Procomm Consulting in Waynesboro, who is letting us use their network services to host the site and had original templates for its design,” Young said. “They had the servers and bandwith to handle the site.”

Future additions Young would like to include to the site are a possible social networking aspect for families to share news, ask questions and get answers, and ways to download forms for usage during the fostering tenure.

“It helps to untie workers from administrative duties and speeds things up,” he said. “It’s more in depth than the other pages that are available.”

Young hopes the site will be a much better way to educate people who might be interested in helping the children.

“I’ve swapped my time from setting up presentations to community groups, which were not as effective,” he said. “I spend about an hour or so [a day] on web issues. If [the site’s] not up, that’s important to know. It’s more for family support.”

Currently about 12 to 15 families make use of the information available to them, via a special log-in to preserve the privacy of the children.

“About one-third of the families [already fostering] may not even have Internet access,” Young said. “But no new people coming into the system have not had e-mail or Internet service. We want people to see the value in it.”

The Longs do.

They’ve completed all their paperwork and are now awaiting the start of the Parent’s Resource for Information, Development and Education 14-session course all applicants must take before receiving child placements.

“We thought the process would be quicker, but the next class starts in August, which means we won’t receive any children until October,” said Long. “But I’ve been staying in touch with Steve through e-mail.”